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The Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Serivces 3.0 ("VSeWSS") enhance Visual Studio 2005 by adding project templates for Web Parts,Site Definitions, List Definitions, List Instance, and List Event Handler Items. It also adds item templates for Custom Fields and Content Types. The List Definition and Content Type template items also have the ability to add an optional Event Receiver class. Also included with the installation of the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services is the stand-alone application called the SharePoint Solution Generator. This application allows a developer to generate a Site Definition project by point to an existing SharePoint site. It will generate a C# solution that can then be opened with Visual Studio and further customized. Some of the new enhancements that are new to version 1.1 include the ability to edit Solution package and numerous bug fixes. Support for Visual Studio 2008 was added to version 1.2. On May 12, 2008, Microsoft released a user guide the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. The download includes a user guide, samples and walkthroughs (for VB.NET and C#). See Paul Andrew - Announcing: Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint - Developer User Guide Support for x64 was added to version 1.3. Product Information
TroubleshootingThis section will cover some troubleshooting this extension. Object reference not set to an instance of an object'''NOTE''' It appears this issue was '''NOT''' resolved in the VSeWSS 1.1 CTP There are many reports of developers receiving this error message in the Error pane within Visual Studio 2005 for no apparent reason. No matter what you attempt to do you cannot seem to get rid of this error message once you receive it. The solution to the problem is actually quite simple and probably quite '''unsupported'''. It is not recommended you do this in your production environment because it will probably render you unsupported by Microsoft.
Once the solution gets deployed to the environment, all the features associated with that solution get stored in the dbo.Features table of the content database where the solution was deployed. When you build your solution, Visual Studio attempts to enumerate this feature table and when it does not find a matching feature ID in the Features folder in the [[12 Hive]] it will throw the ''Object reference not set to an instance of an object'' error message that never seems to go away. The "short-term" SolutionThe quickest way to resolve this issue is to select all the feature ID's out of the dbo.Features table of the associated content database and search for them in your Features folder in the 12 hive. When you do not find a matching feature ID, simply delete that row out of the dbo.Features table. Once all the features in the table have been cleared that do not have associated features in the 12 hive are deleted, you will be able to successfully build and deploy your solutions again. The "long-term" SolutionObviously this is version 1.0 of the product so it is going to have issues. It is also rumored that Microsoft has been made aware of this problem and that they are going to resolve it in the next release – no ETA. Missing Feature UtilityThis utility can be run on each front-end server. It will compare what features are in the database to what are actually in the features folder in the 12 hive. The utility basically just outputs the feature ID of the missing features.
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Visual Studio Extensions For WSS 3.0
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