Stuart Roberts on all things SharePoint

If you’ve created your own workflow activities for SharePoint and want to make the deployment process as simple as possible, one thing you’ll need to do is automate the updating of Authorized Types in the configuration files for the farm.

This thankfully is fairly straight forward and helps to remove a manual step from your deployment process.

Best practice here is to create a feature to deploy the workflow that uses your new activities. Or, if you aren’t creating a workflow, I recommend you deploy the actions file (for SharePoint designer) in a solution. Just for reference, the actions file should be deployed to the templates\[language code]\workflow folder. Whichever way you decide to deploy, you’ll need to create a feature and receiver, as it’s the FeatureActivated method that we’ll use to update the web config files in the farm.
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I’ve recently written a small utility class for SharePoint and thought I’d share it with the community. The class allows you to automate the creation, modification or deletion of WebParts and their content on any number of SharePoint pages.

It came from a requirement to automate the updating of an active site with new functionality, such as adding a WebPart in a specific zone of a particular page or changing the properties of other WebParts. Obviously some of this could be implemented by changing the elements manifest for the pages in question, but this would effectively replace the content with what was defined in the manifest. I needed a way of modifying certain WebParts while leaving changes made by end users intact.

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I’ve recently developed a project to assist with the dynamic generation of CAML queries in .NET projects and have hosted it in CodePlex.

To view the C# source for the tool, or download the latest assembly, please follow this link.

Hopefully you’ll find it as useful as I have. Feel free to leave feedback, although only positive comments will be retained 😉