Monday 28 January 2013

Using WSPBuilder with Visual Studio 2012


The context menu in WSPBuilder has always proved useful, allowing easy GAC deployment of code changes within a DLL and fast IIS debugging.  The latest version of WSPBuilder is aimed at Visual Studio 2010 and so if it is needed for Visual Studio 2012, the .addin file needs updating to tell Visual Studio that it is supported by the current version - 11.

If you execute "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\microsoft\MSEnvShared\Addins", you should see the WSPBuilder addin file listed.  Simply edit this in notepad (remember to 1) close visual studio and 2) run notepad as admin) and duplicate the two hostapplication nodes - "Microsoft Visual Studio" and "Microsoft Visual Studio Macros", amending the version to "11.0".  Once this is done, you will find that the add-in loads and the context menu will appear.  If you are only intending to use Visual Studio 2012 you could, instead, just update any of the nodes from their existing version to "11.0".

One caveat is that, at least in Windows Server 2012+SharePoint 2013, the "Recycle Services Timer" option does not work.  If I get the chance I will fix this and post an update - it's probably something simple.