SharePoint Software Factory for VS2012 (SPSF2012)

The SharePoint Software Factory is a Visual Studio Extension helping SharePoint newbies, as well as experienced developers to create, manage and deploy SharePoint solutions without having to know every tiny XML and C# secret.

SPSF provides a huge collection of helpful recipes for development, debugging and deployment of SharePoint standard artifacts and is fully compatible with SharePoint 2007/2010/2013 and Visual Studio 2008/2010/2012/2013.

This version only supports Visual Studio 2012. 
For Visual Studio 2013 download from here.
For Visual Studio 2008/2010 please download the previous version.

News

• 2013-10-28 Updated release to support Visual Studio 2013. Pleasedownload from here 
• 2013-05-28 Loads of bugfixes, SPSF Projects menu available again (Release Notes)
• 2013-04-29 Recommended update. Several bugs fixed, improved SP2013 support (Release Notes)
• 2013-03-27 Fixed bug which caused resources in _layouts folder to be linked falsely (Release Notes)
• 2013-03-17 First beta release for Visual Studio 2012 and SharePoint 2010/2013 (Release Notes)

For updates on SPSF follow us on CodePlex, Twitter or visit our blogs (links at the end of the page) 

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2012
• SharePoint 2010/2013
• OpenGAX (GAX 2010 for VS2012)
• MS Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012

Resources

• Online documentation
• Recipe Index
• Snippet Index

HowTo's

• How to install SPSF
• How to use the SPSF
• How to update projects to the current SPSF version/enable SPSF on existing projects?
• How to (re-)activate SPSF on existing projects?

Video

How to use the SharePoint Software Factory

To unleash the power of the SharePoint Software Factory, the SharePoint application project has to fulfill some requirements like solution/project structure and existing configuration files. Creating such a project with SPSF does NOT leave you stuck with it forever. At any time you wish to continue development without SPSF, you can uninstall it and your projects will still be compilable and deployable. After successful installation of SPSF SharePoint SoftwareFactory you get started in Visual Studio.

Create a new project in Visual Studio

Start Visual Studio 2012 and click "File -> New -> Project" to create a new Visual Studio project.



In the new project dialog in the section "Guidance Packages -> SharePoint SoftwareFactory" choose the desired project template e.g. "SharePoint 2013 - Application".



Click "OK" and the SPSF project wizard will open.
There you can specify the settings for your solution (i.e. if you want to store language resources in a separate project and if SPSF should handle them).

After clicking finish, a SPSF solution is created which contains a SharePoint project, an optional resources project and a deployment project along with the necessary solution files for automatic code analysis (only on release build), WSP packaging and SPSF configuration.

Run SPSF recipes to create SharePoint code

Most SPSF recipes are displayed in context menus depending on the current selection. For instance the recipe "Content Type" is only displayed on projects which will create a .wsp solution. Some files and folders have also additional recpies to refactor artefacts, e.g. a feature has a recipe to add feature dependencies.



Alternatively you can use the "Add -> New Item..." (Ctrl+Shift+A) dialog to run the SPSF recipes.



The recipe will open a SPSF wizard, which allows you to specify the required information and choose dependencies from existing artefacts in your project or to out-of-the-box SharePoint components.



When you finish the wizard the code will be generated by SPSF following best practices for naming the files and structuring of the solution. If you have enabled resource managment upon project creation all language resources will be automatically stored in .resx files.



All settings you made in the wizard are reflected in the generated files.

From there you can continue development like you would do without SPSF.

Build a deployment package

Whenever you require a deployment package which contains all WSP files or if the solution should be deployed to a different farm, you can build the "Deployment" project which collects all solutions, deployment configurations and the necessary PowerShell scripts.

About us

Matthias Einig
Matthias works as team lead of a SharePoint consulting team. He focuses on SharePoint solution architecture, development, application lifecycle management with Team Foundation Server and in general on improving the quality of custom SharePoint solutions.
Blog:     www.matthiaseinig.de
Twitter: @mattein

Torsten Mandelkow
Torsten has a passion for high quality SharePoint Code. Starting withSPSF SharePoint Software Factory to make SharePoint development easier and more reusable he now focuses on automizing code quality analysis of SharePoint solutions.
Blog:     blogs.msdn.com/b/torstenmandelkow/
Twitter: @tmandelkow