Cloud | MIXIT

We’ve had our SharePoint Online demo ready for a while now. Appie deployed the Fabrikam demo using the scripts provided by Microsoft. The enviromnent looks great to be completely honest, but in order to distinguish ourselves from competitors and have a better, more Mixit specific demo, we require our own Mixit demo environment. Also, this gave me a chance to get my hands dirty and get into SharePoint Online.

The plan was simple: copy a VS2010 branding project from one of the more generic implementations we did, restyle it and deploy to our SharePoint Online environment. Since the project was created for an on premise environment, we were expecting this to not be as smooth as it sounds, here’s an overview of the issues we (me and Dercia) encountered.

Starting with the obvious, our project was a farm solution. Fortunately making it a sandbox solution is simply a matter of setting the Sandboxed Solution project property to true and we’re done.

Let’s have a quick look at the solution before we deploy. The feature we use to staple the branding to new sites is going to be a problem since it’s a farm scope feature. Since we’re only site collection admin, we won’t be able to deploy features higher than site collection. We disable it and will worry about stapling later. Apart from the farm feature all seemed ok, so let’s do a test deploy.

Errors as far as the eye can see. The cause was quite clear though and we could have foreseen this easily. The branding attempts to write images, css and javsscript files to the _images and _layouts folders and since don’t get access to the filesystem, this fails. The solution: deploy the files to the Style Library so they end up in de virtual filesystem and we’re set for another deployment.

“Sandboxed code execution request failed”, an error we hadn’t seen before, but expect to be running into more often. Searching the web resulted in different causes, all of which didn’t seem to apply here. This makes sense of course, since it’s such a generic error. If we would have created my own sandbox solution on my local machine for testing, we would have had more details to the actual problem, but since this is such a small task, we deployed it straight to the online sandbox The error was easily found though: a Feature EventReceiver failed to apply the theme to a site using ThmxTheme.Open. Odd since MSDN assures me this is available in SharePoint Online. For now, we simply removed it and activated the theme manually. This is one to look into at a later stage.

And that was it. The branding works full swing. Good thing too since I’ll be giving a demo about it soon. That meeting will probably result in a few changes and some additional functionality (webparts etc) and get me into the real nitty gritty of SharePoint Online development.