A recap of Part 1
As it was previously described in part one of this two part
series, there are two primary types of pages found in a WSS application,
Application Pages and Site Pages. The first type of SharePoint pages (they can
go in either order by description really) are Application pages, and are
generally aspx pages that you will find used across multiple sites. This is due
to the fact that any SharePoint site, by default, uses the same various virtual
directories that point to the 12 directory (usually "C:\Program
Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12" in a
standard windows and SharePoint install). Since all SharePoint sites use the
same directories, they all use the same pages, which are commonly "behind
the scenes" type administrative type pages. The other type of page, site
pages are those pages that are used inside an individual site for direct user
interaction. These are basically, user level pages that make up the site, for
example the default.aspx page. When you enter a site as a user you will
probably be viewing Site pages. As a user, you will rarely see Application
pages, with a few exceptions… certain login and error pages may be examples of
Application pages of a site that users may see. Ironically, these are also the
types of pages that managers may complain about "not looking like the rest
of the site". The reason for this and possible solutions (but not all
possible solutions) were discussed in Part 1 or this article.
Beginning the new project
This article and project are designed to cover building and
deploying an Application page in a way that builds upon the previous part of
this writing. It is assumed at this point that you have very likely used the
SharePoint Designer at some time to build a SharePoint website. This is a
pretty straight forward process, whether the site has built in page templates
or not. It is not too difficult to add a new ASPX page to the existing site and
customize it according to your needs. This author is likely to detail more
about this in a later article, or you can certainly find more examples of this
objective on the internet. But because building and deploying Application pages
is more involved, this will be our objective.
So with that said, let's get started building and deploying
this project. To give you a basic heads up of what to expect, the following are
some highlights of what will take place with this project as we move forward…
1.
Begin the project with Visual Studio 2005.
2.
Open and make use of all components that are needed, including building
ASPX and code-beside pages by hand.
3.
Deploying the application.
In all, it is basically that simple, so let's begin…
