Creating Custom Field Types and Custom Content Types

Question

Does anyone have any good links for developing custom field and content types that doesn't involve using VSeWSS? Most of the stuff I have seen on the web requires installing VSeWSS, I would rather build them from scratch with just VS2005.

Thanks

Answer 1

I understand the idea of doing it by hand first without a tool to help.

But, you will end up creating a lot of xml by hand. It will really hurt and take a long time.

I would recommend STSDev personally. Use it to create the solution and features for the custom content types and fields, including any custom controls.

Once the package has been created, you can then reverse engineer it to find out the nuts and bolts of how the whole thing holds together.

If you do it on a virtual machine, you can still keep a virgin 2005 install to roll back to when you want to.

I believe this will increase the time to understand what is going on with Content Types and Fields.

Answer 2

I used these blogs to help me with the Custom Fields Here and Here

Answer 3

Not sure about Custom Content Types either. However, if you want to avoid VSeWSS, is using another Visual Studio add-in an option? WSPBuilder includes templates for Custom Field types.

Answer 4

The MOSS Feature Generator on CodePlex is a very robust tool that creates features from existing site data, which means you can create everything you want using the GUI and then export it as features. This is very handy for learning how to create things as well as actually converting existing things into features. It works with Content Types, Site Columns, Lists, etc.

Answer 5

Check out rapid tools and SPDeploy:

http://rapid-tools.googlecode.com

SPDeploy allows you to locally dev a solution using visual studio and deploy a automatically generated wsp remotely.