I was in a SharePoint governance meeting at one of my customer sites yesterday and the group is thinking of enforcing some rules as far as SharePoint solution packages go. I kept saying during the meeting “Inspect the manifest file so that you can view what files are going to be installed on the server and where they are going to get installed”. One of the network engineers asked “How do you read a manifest file given a WSP?” This is probably common knowledge to people who are SharePoint veterans. But if you didn’t know how it’s done, here’s how:

1. Rename the wsp file to a .cab file
2. Open up the .cab file (used to be wsp) in WinZIP or something that can open a CAB file.
3. You can either: a)  extract all files in the cab file and open up the extracted manifest.xml; or b) look for manifest.xml in WinZIP and just extract that one single file.
4. Open up manifest.xml in notepad, Internet Explorer, or your preferred XML file viewer.

That’s it!

Several of my upcoming posts will be on how to create solution packages. Stay tuned!

I had phone meeting with a potential new customer last Thursday and the customer said that he was watching the news about a lunatic who crashed a plane into the IRS building. The news didn’t hit the place I was working at yet so I didn’t know what was going on. But as we talked about the news, it reminded me of 9-11, plane crashing into Pentagon. Plane crashing into a building—yep, it definitely reminds you of the threats out there. Eventually we talked business and ended our call and I went about my day.

I’m not sure if the crash took out IT resources (such as servers) for the IRS. I couldn’t help but think, “If the crash took out IRS servers, were they able to recover in a timely fashion”? Yeah I know it’s geeky and nerdy to be thinking about these things but I’m an IT pro—I can’t help but ponder these things!

Every IT resource—infrastructure and systems alike—should have a disaster/recovery plan. Within government agencies, they like to call this Continuity of Operations Planning or COOP. COOP is pretty comprehensive and includes not just how to recover IT but also how management succession, crisis procedures, etc. If you are part of IT and you get detailed to participate in COOP planning, most of your contributions to this COOP plan will revolve around recovering IT assets such as servers, applications, databases, and the like,

I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen network and DB administrators claim “yeah we have backups” and when disaster comes, the backups were no good and couldn’t be restored! What good is that??! What the hell is that?? See, it’s not enough that you are backing up data and applications; you must also rehearse recovery procedures using the capture back-ups so that you can confidently report to your management, “Yes, we have backups and can recover in the event of a disaster.”

In the SharePoint world, it’s not enough that you are backing up content and configuration databases—you should rehearse recovery procedures from time to time. How do you know you can recover a toasted SharePoint farm configuration if you’ve never rehearsed it and seen with your own two eyes that your backups are good? You must test your recovery procedures.

How often should you backup and test recovery procedures? Well, one can probably write a dedicated Web site just on the topic of disaster-recovery (just google it and there are tons). So, without having to discuss this too much, as a general guide I like to follow, the more critical your systems, the more backups and test-recovery procedures you should do. For less-critical apps, your frequency doesn’t have to be as extensive (the important thing is you do it). Just as an example, for critical apps—daily full back-ups with incremental back-ups during the day and test recovery procedures every 2 weeks. The “least frequent” backup schedule I’ve ever done for a “non-critical” app is bi-weekly full backups and test recoveries every 3 months.

The point is, you must backup and be ready to recover when disaster strikes. Nine years ago, the terrorists attacked WTC and the Pentagon. Last week, some lunatic had a personal grudge against the government. Who knows, maybe this week, some admin at your office spills some latte on your production server and toasts mission-critical apps. Whatever the disaster may be, be ready.

Using VSeWSS 1.3 with Visual Studio 2008, when you create a new Web Part project, you can edit the Web part properties and descriptions using the WSP View. The typical Solution Explorer in VS 2008 looks like the following when working on a Web part project:

In order to see the manifest.xml or feature.xml file, you have to look at the “WSP View“. WSP View can be accessed by going to the menu and hitting View–>Other Windows–>WSP View. The WSP View looks like the following:

The manifest.xml file doesn’t contain “product description” type information. The manifest.xml contains assemblies and features information. The feature.xml file, that on the other hand, start containing “description” type data. Here’s what the feature.xml contents typically look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Feature Id="cfc5cfdd-62cf-4d98-aeba-e1b38ec6f64f"

             Title="HelloPart"

             Description="A Web part that wants to say hello to you."

             Scope="Site" Version="1.0.0.0" Hidden="FALSE"

             DefaultResourceFile="core" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">

  <ElementManifests>

    <ElementManifest Location="HelloPart\HelloPart.xml" />

    <ElementFile Location="HelloPart\HelloPart.webpart" />

  </ElementManifests>

</Feature>

See that Title and Description attributes inside the Feature element? They will get displayed in the Site Features Gallery: 

What about the Web part file (in the example I’m using above, the filename is HelloPart.webpart)? What information can be customized and modified here? First, let’s take a look at the contents of the webpart file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<webParts>

  <webPart xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebPart/v3">

    <metaData>

      <!--

      The following Guid is used as a reference to the web part class,

      and it will be automatically replaced with actual type name at deployment time.

      -->

      <type name="247ef4d4-489d-46d1-a628-8d8daa6267a3" />

      <importErrorMessage>Cannot import HelloPart Web Part.</importErrorMessage>

    </metaData>

    <data>

      <properties>

        <property name="Title" type="string">Gabe's Hello Web Part</property>

        <property name="Description" type="string">HelloPart is a user-friendly Web part....</property>

      </properties>

    </data>

  </webPart>

</webParts>

Inside webPart–>data–>properties section, there are property elements. The first one is the “Title” and the other is the “Description“. The values for “Title” and “Description” contained in the webpart file are what gets displayed in the Web part catalog:

 

Finally, let’s take a look at the Web part XML file (in the example I used above, the filename is HelloPart.xml). The Web part XML file contains the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Elements Id="247ef4d4-489d-46d1-a628-8d8daa6267a3" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" >

  <Module Name="WebParts" List="113" Url="_catalogs/wp">

    <File Path="HelloPart.webpart" Url="HelloPart.webpart" Type="GhostableInLibrary" />

  </Module>

</Elements>

See how the File element doesn’t have any children? We can put a Property element as a child of the File element. This Property element will contain the “Group” the Web part appears in the catalog. By default, like the in the Web part XML file example above, the Group is not specified and therefore, the Web part gets listed under Miscellaneous Group in the Web Part catalog. If you want the Web part to appear in a group other than Miscellaneous, transform the Web part XML file from the above example to the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Elements Id="247ef4d4-489d-46d1-a628-8d8daa6267a3" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/" >

  <Module Name="WebParts" List="113" Url="_catalogs/wp">

        <File Path="HelloPart.webpart" Url="HelloPart.webpart" Type="GhostableInLibrary">

              <Property Name="Group" Value="My Stuff"/>

        </File>

  </Module>

</Elements>

We added the Property element below the File element. The Name attribute of the Property element should have a value of “Group” and the Value attribute is the group name you want the Web part to appear in the catalog. In the example above, after the Web part gets deployed, the Web part appears in a category called “My Stuff“: