Thanks to Chris Johnson I now know how to create a feature staple with VSeWSS.

If you don't know what a staple is then Chris has a good description on his blog.  You should read this first for more background but my simple explanation of a feature staple follows.

Feature staples are a way of attaching customisations to existing features and hence site definitions.  This is acheived by creating a feature that associates itself with another feature.  You can also add Feature Receiver code (which is like an event handler for feature activation) that lets you do all sorts of goodness that you can't do with CAML.

Feature stapling is the reccommened way of customising SharePoint.  Site definitions may appear to be a good way to go, but dont.  Andrew Connell explains why.

To create a staple you actually need to create two features:  the feature that you want activated and a feature to do the stapling. 

Update:  I just found a much better description of the process here.

VSeWSS 1.1 does not yet support feature stapling via an item template, but you can still do this via a neat trick that the VSeWSS team provided.  Here's the steps.

1. Create an Empty VSeWSS project:
   
   
   
2. Add a module for the feature you want stapled.  This this case I just used the default module that copies sample.txt.
3. Switch to WSP View and refresh.
4. Open the module feature.xml and change the scope to Site.
5. Open the Module.xml for the new module and change the Url to "MyModule" and add RootWebOnly="FALSE":
   
   
   
6. Deploy the solution and make sure that you get sample.txt in a new folder MyModule.
7. Now for the stapler.  In the solution explorer, create a new folder called Stapler.  Add a new XML filed to this called element.xml.  This will contain the feature associations:
   
   This element.xml contains 3 associations for the new Module.  The Id GUID is from Module1.  Get this value from the WSP View of Module1 feature.xml.  The TemplateName is found in 12\TEMPLATE\1033\XML\WEBTEMP.XML - STS is the name of the templte and #0, #1, #2 is the configuration.  So, this staple associates Module1 with Blank Site, Team Site and Document Workspace.
   
   Make sure the element Id is a new unique GUID.  WSP uses this.
   
   Note: there are issues with the blank site.  I can't find the reference to the explaination of this.. will update when I do.
   
8. Switch to WSP View and refresh.  You should see a new Feature appear for the staple called Untitiled1.  Rename the folders to the name of your stapler thus:
   
   
   You should also change the Title in the feature.xml.
   
9. Edit the feature.xml for the Stapler and set the Scope to Farm:  
    
10. Deploy and pray.
11. Test & checking.  The stapler feature will be deployed to the farm.  Check the Farm Features to make sure it's there. VSeWSS will also deploy the module to the default site so you need to create a new site to test that the staple works. 
12. Create a new Team site.  Use SharePoint designer to see if the MyModule folder is created.
13. Now that you have the stapler working you can create a feature receiver to perform any code based actions.  I haven't done this part yet.  I'll post again when I do.

Normally you will use this method to deploy a master page, aspx page, css etc.  If this is the case then you probably don't need to copy these files to every sub-site, just to the root site.  Set RootWebOnly to TRUE if you want.  Remember that if Module1 is copying files to a library then you need Type=GhostableInLibrary for each file that is copied.

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I'm often asked 'How do I get to be a great programmer like you Pete?'.  Well not quite, I added the last bit, but Tokes provides a better answer than I ever could. 

I completely agree with Tokes, being a (Microsoft) developer is getter way harder. But it's not Microsoft's fault.  It's those pesky users.  I always said that being a developer would be a piece of cake if it wasn't for users!  They seem to want more and more every year and are less impressed by coded coolness.   In fact, I think there is a formula to calculate coolness:

(C is Coolness, loc is lines of code, si is systems integrated, To is time overrun)

Time seems to be suffering too.  As systems and requirements grow in complexity there seems to be some sort of temporal distortion reducing the amount of time available to a developer. I think Stephen Hawking discovered this when he ran out of budget for his black hole simulator (SimHole).

Developers must also share the blame for increasing complexity. We are always chasing the next best thing without much regard for using what we already have.  Microsoft's job is to create temptation - it's us developers that can't keep our hands out of the cookie jar.  Visual Basic 6 is still a great tool.  Visual Studio 2008 just looks prettier!

It's no wonder that fewer and fewer kids are taking up IT as a career. Although, with both parents in the industry my 3 kids seem to be heading in the right direction.  Maybe we as developers should procreate more?

I had a custom field type in my MOSS solution that was a simple CODE type.  This was based on a Text type but all it did was to uppercase any value.

However, when I referenced a list that used this field type from InfoPath the column would not display in InfoPath.

I haven't figured out how to do this yet so I reverted back to a Text field for now.  I'm guessing there is an attribute I need to add the the module.xml or maybe in code? If you have a solution, I'd love to know :)

Not sure what it fixes - but it's gotta help!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B57C805D-2821-4625-A6F1-80725267F887&displaylang=en

I truly wish you haven't been wasting as much time as I have this week with SharePoint anonymous access and a custom master page.

I have a site that uses a custom membership provider, forms authentication, anonymous access and a custom master page.  My problems were many but in the end the main one was getting anonymous access to the home page.  This would always give me an ugly 401 error.

After a good nights sleep and with a clear head, I finally realised that the problem was not with Pages/default.aspx but with it's masterpage which as not deployed correctly.  I had missed putting type="GhostableInLibrary" into the file node of the module:

  <Module Name="MasterPages" Url="_catalogs/masterpage" Path="" RootWebOnly="TRUE" >
    <File Path="mine.master" Url="mine.master" Type="GhostableInLibrary" IgnoreIfAlreadyExists="FALSE" />
  </Module>

It's the little things that can really screw you!

TGIF.

If you are having problems creating a State Machine workflow for SharePoint in VB (and I really dont know why you would want to use VB but... :) then you may see an error about missing files, Workflow1.layout and Workflow1.resx.  If this is the case then you need to copy these files from the C# Project Tempalte zip to the VB version.  Full details are in the following blog post comments- it's a long one so search for workflow1.layout to find it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/06/07/introduction-to-sharepoint-workflow.aspx

A blog-less colleage of mine, Bryce, just discovered redirects in IIS 6, which is something new for me also.  Bloody useful if you are moving site content around, moving servers or just want to make URL's more friendly.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/41c238b2-1188-488f-bf2d-464383b1bb08.mspx?mfr=true

This is particularly relevant for sites with really long and complex URL's, e.g.: SharePoint, in which case you should also read:  http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=48

To create a forms library definition with VSeWSS 1.1 is very easy.  You can similarly create a list definition based on a content type.  However, you cant automatically create a forms library with an attached content type.

This is how I did it.

1. Create your content type
2. Create a temporary list based on the content type
3. Create a form library list
4. Edit the forms lib schema.xml
1. Copy the content type fields from the temporary list schema to the <Fields> node.
2. Update the <List> node, adding:
   
   

3. BaseType="1"
   Direction="0"
   EnableContentTypes="TRUE"

4. In <ContentTypes> optionally remove the base Form content type reference if you only want to allow the specific content type:

   <ContentTypeRef ID="0x010101"> ... </ContentTypeRef>

5. Add a new <ContentTypeRef> that has the ID that matches the content type you created in step 1.

5. Delete the temporary list definition
6. Deploy and cheer!

Here's a small trick that confused me for a while this morning.  VSeWSS creates a setup.bat & .wsp file that will deploy a site definition into a specified server.  Running setup.bat from the command prompt appears to be the obvious way to do that.  You can also override the default web and site urls, e.g:

setup /weburl http://myserver /siteurl http://myserver

The default being localhost (or whatever you developed against).

However, this was failing for me becuase the specified web did not yet have a root site collection and some part of the site definition (web parts) were scoped to the site.

The solution is to create a blank site using stsadm thus:

stsadm -o createsite -url http://myserver -ownerlogin administrator -owneremail me@myemail.com

Then you can deploy the site defintion using setup.bat. When you browse to the new site you will be prompted with a list of possible site definitions.

Like all things SharePoint this is easy and obvious when you know...