SPB usage guide – 1 Download and Installation
This is the guide on how to install and use the SharePoint Branding Project.
Download: Visual Studio gallery
The guide is devided into three parts:
1 Download and Installation
2 Configuration and Modification
3 Deployment and verification (soon to be released)
Hi friends.
Allow me to welcome you on a journey to the wonderful world of SharePoint Branding. I created this SharePoint Branding Project thinking that the overhead and the learning curve to just get started with branding, was way too high. The amount of blogs to read and discard until you could actually build you very first, very basic custom branding solution, it was rediculous! Now pretty recently, the guides on Technet have been improved and most of them actually work, but it is still a long way to go if you want to start from scratch with little or no knowledge about how you go about creating such a project in Visual Studio.
With the SharePoint Branding Project, you can brand your company, organization or customer SharePoint in about 10 minutes, and you will have full control doing so. Follow this guide and you will cruise all the way to the finnish line.
To use this template, you need a SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio on the same machine. If you can follow instructions, then you can achieve this.
Now, lets get started and have some fun, this IS fun after all!
There are two ways to download the extension file from the Visual Studio Gallery, the first is to simply go to the Visual Studio gallery, Click SPB.
Then on the large purple button, Click Download.
In the annoying but useful IE download bar, Click Open.
Click ‘Install’ to install the extension into Visual Studio.
When the extension is installed you will get a ‘Complete’ notice. Click Close in the dialog.
You are now done downloading and Installing the actual extension and you can now move on to the interesting stuff, to create a SharePoint Branding Project in Visual Studio.
But before we go into how, we will show you another way to install the extension. From Visual Studio Extension Manager. The extension manager will show the installed extension regarless of the way you installed it, here you will also be notified of updates that have been released of the same extension.
Follow these steps from Visual Studio:
Start the Extension Manager from Visual Studio, Tools menu, Click Extension Manager…
Click Online Gallery and search for SPB or browse the ‘Templates’ category and ‘SharePoint’ and you will find the SPB extension.
Click Download and the file will download and initiate the installation. Click Install in the next dialog:
When the extesion have been installed, you can’t wait to get going with the branding right. Ok, we will start that part, regardless of the way you choose to perform the download and installation, and the installation (Which is very quick) has completed, in Visual Studio, select File, New and Click Project:
In the Installed Templates section, select Visual C#, SharePoint, 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Branding Project.
Name the project (This name will also be the name of the SharePoint Feature once deployed to SharePoint), select the projects file location and Click OK.
Now you are done with the installation and can move on to the next step in this guide:
2 Configuration and Modification
or jump directly to the last step, not recommended:
3 Deployment and verification(soon to be released)
Stay tuned!
Enjoy!
Regards
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blksthl 
Hi
I had a thought. Normally, when I edit a master page and add/modify I want to do it quickly in SPD 2010. I guess I could still do that with the branding project master page and when I am happy export to the VS2010 project. I do have VS2010 Pro and SP2010 running locally in my vm though. I am Interesting to hear your thoughts.
Hi.
Absolutely, you can do that. Use SDP as an ‘editor’ to get the masterpage just right and then add it to the Project for ‘proper’ deployment.
Sounds like a good idea, that way you don’t have to deploy, deploy, deploy to test every change in a testsite but you get the benefit of the SPD’s WYSIWYG design view.
Regards
Thomas
Thanks for the confirmation. Slightly off topic for my next deployment I want to add a ref to jQuery to the master page. Nomally I use the ‘traditional syntax’ but I thought I would try the more portable script link – just wondered if you had tried this.
SharePoint:ScriptLink language=”javascript” name=”~sitecollection/Style Library/Script/jquery-1.8.0.min.js” Defer=”true” runat=”server”
Hi.
Not tried it but I would appreciate it if you could post your feedback after you tried it?
The Branding package will be perfect for packaging and deploying the java files as well so that could be an addon for the future. Don’t know yet how this will look in 2013 with the new branding concept there, but I assume that there will still be a need for better Tools..
Regards
// Thomas
Thomas
I am pleased to report back the following
1) I checked jQuery worked with traditional style syntax
script type=”text/javascript”
src=”/mysitecollection/Style%20Library/Scripts/jquery-1.8.0.min.js”
$(document).ready(function() {alert(‘hi’);});</script
3) then I commented the above and replaced with
SharePoint:ScriptLink language="javascript" name="~sitecollection/Style Library/Scripts/jquery-1.8.0.min.js"
Defer="false" runat="server"/
It works baecause sharepoint renders scriptlink with a "document.write" call with the syntax.
Be warned: THE ABOVE SYNTAX HAS TO BE PRECISE OTHERWISE YOU GET ODD ERRORS IN YOUR BROWSER.
Great!
Thanks for the update.
I’ll try it out.
Regards
// Thomas
Is there a VS 2012 or VS 2013 version of this project?
Hi AJK
Unfortunately not. It has been on my todo list for a very long time, but other things seem to get in the way…
Same as a projecttemplate for 2013…and SPO.
Regards
// Thomas
Reblogged this on SharePoint Samurai and commented:
Great Visual Studio Add-On for easy Branding