Beginning SharePoint Web Part Development
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This is the first article in a series focusing on WSS 3.0 development using Visual Studio 2008. This article is for beginners who are quite new to SharePoint web part development and want to learn about configuring WSS 3.0, developing web parts using Visual Studio 2008, deploying and publishing web parts and finally debugging a web part.
My development machine is equipped with following environment before installing any of SharePoint related software or tools:
Windows Server 2003 with SP1
IIS
SQL Server 2005 (comes with .NET 2.0) with SP2
Visual Studio 2008 (comes with .NET 3.5)
Office 2007
Before you start, you should have following installed on your machine:
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1
WSS 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2008 Extensions v1.2
The entire source code for this article is available in the form of a free downloadable zip file. The solution was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1. I didn’t really test it in any other environment. I request that you post in the discussion area if you have any problems in execution.
Configuring WSS 3.0: Create Sample web site and site collection
Once you have installed WSS 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008 Extensions from the previous URLs provided, you can go through the following steps to create a sample web site and web page where our web parts can be tested.
NOTE: Once WSS is installed, the default web site (in IIS) gets stopped and the WSS web site runs on port 80 of IIS.
Go to http://localhost/default.aspx.
Go to Site Actions || Create
Select “Sites and Workspaces.”
In the “New Sharepoint Site” page, provide the Title, Description and URL name as follows, select “Blank Site” as the template and finally hit “Create.”
Once new web site gets created, go to the web site and go to Site Actions || Create.
Select “Document Library.”
Provide details for the new document library as follows,
and create it.
Configuring WSS 3.0: Create a web part web page
So far, we've created a new WSS site and document library. In this section we will create a web part page.
Once the new site collection gets created, go to that site collection and click on Site Actions || Create.
Select “Web Part Page.”
In the “Create New Web Part” page, provide details as follows.
Finally, you should land on the following page.
Next: Developing your first WSS 3.0 web part using Visual Studio 2008 extensions >>
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