Visual Studio Deployment Configuration

It happens to be the case when you want to make some changes to a feature and redeploy it using VS but sometimes it doesn't work the way it should or worked first time around. I tried to deploy a WSP solution containing 3 list definitions & instances, but VS 2012 kept trying to activate features when I don't need it, well at least at the time of solution deployment.

Packaging Explorer Deployment Configuration

Visual Studio 2012 lets you use Packaging Explorer to configure WSP solution deployment. So to change them within the properties tab I set "Activate on Default" to False, but VS 2012 just ignored it and still tried to activate the feature and threw an error - which is another story,

Did some research and figured out these properties within Packing Explorer are set to be used when we deploy the solution by command line or using Power Shell only e.g. VS ignores them. Ummm so does this means we can't change solution deployment configuration when deploying using VS 2012 then.... Answer is Yes, you can but at VS project level !!

Visual Studio Deployment Configuration

While deploying a WSP solution VS follows steps provided within project specific deployment configuration setup for SharePoint as shown below,

Just select the deployment steps you want VS to follow when deploying a WSP solution for a project and it should all work fine...

Quick Guide for setting up SharePoint environment for Apps

Following several guides and going through many articles at last I am able to install SharePoint Apps on my environment, you will find several incomplete and confusing articles on internet.

I followed Vlad Catrinescu article which is to the point and actually works, it took me just 5 minutes to configure my test environment for installing apps from SharePoint online Store.

Here's link to Vlad's article,

http://www.scribd.com/doc/124831209/Configure-an-Environment-for-Apps-for-SharePoint-2013-Step-by-Step-Guide

Since the above article gets into much details along with screenshots, I will just mention important points you need to go through to get it working,

- Create a forward look-up zone with zone name e.g. "exampleapps.com"

- Create a New Alias (CNAME) with name as "*" and FQDN for target host as full name of your     SharePoint Server, e.g. www.exampleServer.com or whatever's your server's name is

- Now on your try to ping Apps-23423423423.exampleapps.com and get the response, if it doesn't work then either you entered FQDN of target host wrong or your DNS server isn't locating your SharePoint web server. Put a comment if you get stuck here and I will try to help.

- Create, configure and start SharePoint App management and Subscription server on your SharePoint server

-  Now Configure App URLs in Central Admin, App domain going to be exampleapps.com in this case and App prefix will be "Apps"

- You will need to configure internet facing endpoints for apps, so I just enabled web application scoped feature named as "Apps that require accessible internet facing endpoints" on my port 80 web application.

- Create a new web application on port 80, but keep the Host Header option empty and rest options as usual, now note, if you used SharePoint configuration wizard then you don't need to create a new web application because SharePoint configuration wizard by default creates a web application without host headers, so all you need to do is to create a root site collection.

- Last but important step, delete Default Website in IIS Server, otherwise you will receive 404 errors for sharepoint apps.

Note: I followed these steps on a development server, so try them on production on your own risk :-).

MSDN article if you want to follow for setting up App domain.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161236.aspx