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Just a quick note (as a reminder to self). Here's a list of the Custom Activity Type Names that you can refer to in your code :

For those out there that are a little curious as to whether SAF is any use to your organisation, please read this FAQ.

One of the major areas developed for v2 of the SharePoint Action Framework (SAF) is its ability to integrate tightly with Msbuild. In order to get SAF working, you simply need to reference the Msbuild Saf task - which can be referenced like this ...

We are very proud to announce that SAF v2 is now ready for a road test. Checkout this post to see whats new and improved!

It’s 6am and I am bored, so I thought I would give you a quick heads up on what’s coming in the next version of SAF (due by the end August). Checkout this post for all the new features coming to SAF.

If you have ever deployed a SharePoint Content Type via a Feature (using standard CAML) you will more than likely run into one or more of the various “quirks”, namely : 1. The Content Type deploys correctly if its not already in the Farm, but if your Content Type is in use, or customised via the GUI then updating Feature has no effect. In this situation you are forced to create your Feature with CAML, but upgrade and maintain it with Feature Receiver Code. 2. If you want to “push” your changes down to any lists, this has to be done in code.

I am pleased to announce that it’s now possible (with release 1.2.3463.00) , to run STSADM commands from the SharePoint Action Framework (SAF). Hence, if you add the standard STSAdm commands (that ship with SharePoint) to the truly awesome collection that Gary Lapointe has developed, (available on his STSADM Blog), you are looking at over 250 useful SharePoint Actions.

A quick overview of how SAF can help migrate content from a list, web or site.

A couple of you emailed and asked how to install SAF (version 2), so here's some instructions. The post defines exactly how to install or upgrade the SAF solution package.

At Last! Finally, we have released the SharePoint Action Framework (SAF) on CodePlex!! Please take a look at : http://saf.codeplex.com . Now that I can take a minute, I just wanted to spend a bit of time detailing why we have spent the best part of 18 months (with lots of late nights building it!)

In a previous post, I explained my findings with "Upgrading Content Types", but now I want to test out a few scenarios with upgrading Site Columns. On the whole, the test results for Site Columns were pretty similar to that of Content Types. Although, I wanted to test what we can do when it comes to updating site columns that contain data. If you don't want to read each test case, please check out the "Summary" at the end of this post.

A simple post outlining awesome resources on the net to help dev, administer and deploy the beast that is SharePoint.

If you want to find out specifically what happens if you want to make changes to SharePoint Content Types, Columns and Lists that have previously been deployed using Features and CAML, this this post is for you! There are a series of cases testing out exactly what happens.

This blog post illustrates how to add a custom action into an MSI targeted for a 64 bit platform. Hence, If you want to run custom actions on a 64 bit platform then this is the read for you!

Excellent list on SharePoint Web Content Management resources compiled by one of my favourite SharePoint authors - Andrew Connell. You will find it here.

Unit testing has taken a new momentum with the rise of the agile development practices. NUnit is a fantastic and simple unit-testing framework for all .Net languages but if you used it before you have probably come across the difficulty on how to isolate the unit that you want to test. NMock was created to address this issue. Mock Objects to the Rescue is a very good article on how to use this useful tool.

Today I was trying to find a way to programmatically create a publishing page and start the default approval workflow attached to the pages library. The reason that I had to programmatically start the workflow (instead of relying on SharePoint to automatically start it for me) was because my code was running under the system account (in this case under a WCF web service IIS process) and, since SP1, SharePoint will not automatically start a workflow if the list item is being changed by the system account (see this blog post for more information).

One of the best articles that I’ve read so far about the importance of properly disposing SPWeb and SPSite objects has been written by one of my favourite SharePoint bloggers Stefan Gossner and can be found here.

MOSS has been the most successful server product Microsoft ever released. Sales are growing much faster than Microsoft ever expected and apparently the UK is outstripping worldwide growth (for more see this). Unfortunately this quick growth is also highlighting one of the major problems that everyone seems to be struggling with - deployment. I've been working with MOSS since Beta 2 and I have debated this issue with other colleagues and we are all in agreement: deployment is one of the biggest pains on any SharePoint project. It's one of the areas that will give you more problems and cost you more money. What is curious is that all companies adopting SharePoint seem to go through the same evolution path. Finding a way to measure where my customers are on this path gives me a good idea on the challenges that I will be facing when moving their projects forward. The kind of measure that I'm talking about it's called a Maturity Model so I called it the Deployment SharePoint Maturity Model (SDMM).

SharePoint should be seen as another layer in the technology stack that your code will interact with. But just because you are using this layer you should not forget to follow good and proven design practices. The following points describe some of the principles that sometimes seem to be forgotten when using SharePoint: