Copying files to the 12 Hive with VSEWSS Extensions 1.3

This had me stumped for a while earlier, I had created a Web Part project and wanted to include an image to be deployed to the TEMPLATE\IMAGES directory of the 12 hive.

Originally I added a module to the project but this would then copy the image to a folder in the actual site itself which I didn’t want.

The solution is to use a ‘Template’ –

Right click on the project in Visual Studio and select Add > New Item

Select a ‘Template’ and give it a name, this will add a folder in your solution called ‘Templates’ with a text file inside that has the name you gave above.

You can then add the 12 hive TEMPLATES folder structure under here and any files will be copied to the 12 hive when the wsp solution package is installed.

Hope this helps!

VseWSS 1.3 CTP March 09 – Still Buggy

I’ve been developing a web part today and thought I would try the VseWSS extensions to see if they would get the job done quicker, I normally just create the Visual Studio solution myself and use WSPBuilder (http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder) to deploy it.

After I had built my web part I clicked to debug and was presented with the following error:

To get past this error I used the following two blog posts:

http://blogs.msdn.com/steve_fox/archive/2009/03/18/vsewss-1-3-post-install-configuration.aspx

http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2009/02/05/vsewss-1-3-ctp-feedback-and-feature-requests.aspx

It seems that the error is because the account running the application pool for VseWSS web application in IIS does not have the correct permissions. I was on a domain controller so simply gave the account domain admin permissions. This however did not fix the error and I ended up giving the account full control to the folder itself!

When I tried to deploy again I did not get the above error but now a different one (See screenshot below)! I cannot find any more details on this error and the folders specified in the error message do not even exist.  I think im going to go back to using WSPBuilder from now on as it seems the VseWSS extensions are still quite buggy.

If anyone has any more details on the above error and how to fix it then please let me know 🙂