Thanks Todd Baginski - Making development easier with the SharePoint Feature Manager

Making development easier with the SharePoint Feature Manager

I’ve been creating SharePoint Features on a regular basis lately to enhance some custom Site Definitions. I have found that administering SharePoint Features via the command line is a tedious process and I’m not a big fan of the command line (even though I grew up with an Apple //e).

I decided to make the process to administer SharePoint Features as easy as point and click, so I developed a small Windows application I’m calling the SharePoint Feature Manager.

Here is a screenshot of the SharePoint Feature Manager:

The SharePoint Feature Manager allows you to quickly Install, Uninstall, Activate and Deactivate Features for SharePoint V3. The utility also allows you to call the stsadm.exe utility with command line arguments you specify.

The SharePoint Feature Manager utilizes the stsadm.exe command line utility that comes with SharePoint V3 to perform the tasks previously mentioned, and is designed to be run on the SharePoint Server you are administering.

To use the SharePoint Feature Manager, enter the name of the SharePoint Site URL, browse to the Feature.XML file that corresponds to the Feature you want to work with on the SharePoint Server, and select the Operation to perform from the dropdown list.

Then, click the Compose button to compose the command line arguments that will be sent to the stsadm.exe utility. If you need to use the -force switch, simply check the Force checkbox.

Finally, either copy and paste the composed command line to a command prompt and execute it, or click the Execute button to execute the command line via the SharePoint Feature Manager application.

Don't forget to click the Compose button before you click the Execute button if you are using the Install, Uninstall, Activate or Deactivate operations. The application uses the value in the Command line arguments textbox when you click the Execute button.

I've built some flexibility into this application to allow other command line arguments to be passed to the stsadm.exe utility. To provide your own arguments, simply select Custom in the Operation dropdown, then populate the Command line arguments textbox with your own. For example, to return a list of all the sites within your portal enter the following value into the Command line arguments textbox and click the Execute button.

-o enumsites -url "http://SharePointServerName"

Clicking the Reset IIS button will reset IIS on the machine where the SharePoint Feature Manager application is run from. See, like I said, I wanted to make this a point and click effort.

Finally, the Configuration menu item allows you to set the paths to the STSADM.EXE and IISRESET.EXE utilities. These paths are only preserved while the application is running and they are set to their default values each time the application is opened.

Here is a screen shot of the Configuration screen:

Here is the link to download the application:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/files/97/tbaginski/entry8420.aspx

I hope this application helps out all the SharePoint developers out there!

Please send me an email if you find any bugs in this application.