SharePoint 2010 – renaming features and web parts in VS.NET 2010 SharePoint Solutions

1. In solution, select the Feature
   
   
   
   Change the “Folder Name” property to new name. Press Enter – VS.NET will try to help you rename everything correctly.  The reason this field is called “Folder Name” is because SharePoint packaged solutions are deployed to the 14 HIVE, and are organized by folders there.
   Double click on the feature to bring up the Feature designer UI, you still need to change the Title and Description
   
   
2. To rename the web part
   
   
   
   Change the Folder Name
   You still need to change the actual UserControl file name
   
   
   
   As well as the user control filename, class name… standard .NET stuff.  Some tools such as VS.NET’s rename tool, or if you use Resharper, can help you with class renaming.
3. WARNING: generally renaming packages is very bad after you have deployed to production. This should not be done lightly. 

SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight

Was working on a presentation on SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight.

Finally, I get to marry my two favourite technologies in one awesome demo.

There’s not a lot of people blogging about this yet, but what we were digging up was very delightful.

In bullet point form – because this is a brain dump blog post, and if you want to know how everything ties together you’ll have to catch up to one of the user groups where I present this stuff (or Adam Cogan… he gets around a lot more than me):

Technologies that made it possible:

• SharePoint web services
• SharePoint REST / OData services NEW
  • This is actually great news for the AJAX / JavaScript crowd.  Technically, you can write JQuery solutions that will query SharePoint for you.
• Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll(s), and the corresponding Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll(s) – which are awesome wrappers
• CAML is nearly gone, but still lingers on for huge data processing.
• LINQ to SharePoint is the new crafting knife
• Silverlight XAP files can be uploaded anywhere
• Silverlight web part can load XAP files and run them
  • So a user that can upload a short movie to SharePoint, then configure a Silverlight movie player to play that movie… already has the permissions required to run custom XAP applications.
• Which, if you stop and think about it, is a “different” deployment model!