SharePoint 2010 Master Pages and Page Layouts

It has been a little while since I we were tasked to build a SharePoint Master Page and Corresponding Page Layouts.  I wanted to go through a bit of what we did and the developers’ working environment.

Our development environment (single Virtual Machine with 10Gb RAM) consisted of the following:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (You can use Windows 7 SP1 if you wanted)
• SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1
• Visual Studio 2010 SP1
• SharePoint Designer 2010 SP1
• SharePoint Server 2010 SP1
• CKS – Development Tools Edition (Server)
• Adobe Photoshop CS5 (slicing images)

If you are in a hurry to get an environment up and running you can download the “fresh” Hyper-V Virtual Machine set from Microsoft if you’re short on time.  The development machine is simply a laptop Intel i7 based with 16Gb RAM and dual SSDs running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 so we could leverage Hyper-V. Windows 7 (x64) SP1 and VMWare Workstation would work just as well but you would have to build your own images.

Some of the things I really liked was the tight integration with Visual Studio 2010 and Team Build 2010.

The Master Pages and references used for our SharePoint 2010 Publishing Site project:

• Starter Master Pages for SharePoint 2010 (Formerly known as Minimal Master Pages) by Randy Drisgill (SharePoint MVP)
• Real World Branding with SharePoint 2010 Publishing Sites by Andrew Connell, Critical Path Training LLC (SharePoint MVP) | Randy Drisgill, SharePoint911 (SharePoint MVP)

You will still need to spend a lot of your time initially in SharePoint Designer 2010 working with your Master Page, CSS and Page Layouts.

I will say the experience was great, working in the latest version SharePoint Designer is much improved over the 2007 release.

I thought I would miss WSPBuilder but honestly not having to hand edit all those “Elements.xml” files was great.

and the addition of the CKS extensions to Visual Studio 2010 definitely enhanced the development and deployment experience for us.

If you’re interested in getting Team Build 2010 to work with your SharePoint 2010 project this MSDN How to will get you building your SharePoint projects.

Deploying WSPs is considerably more reliable when they do not come off a developers workstation.  If you want to deploy your WSP automatically you can use Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management to build yourself a testing environment or take a look at TFS Deployer from Readify.