Installation Instructions for EnsynchILM2ActivityLibrary

Brad Turner has graciously agreed to do me a huge favor and post the code from his TEC workshop on Codeplex for everyone to enjoy. The project is called EnsynchILM2ActivityLibrary, and Brad summarizes it in this post. I apologize that we're initially posting it without a walkthrough document, but I foresee several blog posts using this code, as well as perhaps a webinar or two. Besides, I've been using the Ensynch Diagnostic Activity in all my blog posts thus far, so it'll be nice to have a new starting point.

Brad did, however, agree to post the code on the condition that I supply the installation instructions. So here goes.

1. Once you have the project saved to your hard drive, open it in Visual Studio and make sure you can Rebuild Solution. Note that we used Visual Studio 2008 to create the project, so that's a prerequisite. Let me know if you have any issues building the project. I ran into (at least) one pitfall that took a little out-of-the-box thinking to solve, but it should be fixed with this project, and I'll save that for another blog post. :)
   


2. In the top-leve project folder, double-click the deploy.bat file. Pay attention to the output; you may have to edit the path to 'gacutil' if yours is in a different location. Also, on one of our VMs, the Identity Management service refuses to die right away, so I end up having to restart it from the Services snap-in.
   


3. Note that this project contains Joe Schulman's public resource management client, so we'll have to merge its application settings from SampleApplication\app.config into our web service config file. Please follow the instructions in my earlier post to make the changes.
   


4. Our Owner Rollup Activity uses a Filter Builder control, and there's a trick to making it render correctly. The trick is to copy the contents of the FilterBuilder.css file into your SharePoint Core.css file. I've already described this step in a previous post, so please follow those instructions and come back here when you're done.
   


5. Now we have tell ILM 2 where to find the web interfaces for our activities (called ActivitySettingsPart). In this step, we'll be creating Activity Information Configuration objects. Once again, I've spawned off a separate post to reduce the clutter in this one. Please follow the instructions in that post and return here when finished.
   


6. Finally, you'll have to run the deploy.bat file again in order for the changes we made in the last steps to take effect.
   

Now you should see the activities show up in the Activity Picker when you create a Workflow in the ILM 2 portal. I encourage you to experiment with the code, and feel free to leave me any comments on issues you run into or aspects that you'd like to see explained. Remember that when you make a change to the code, you'll have to repeat steps 1 & 2 above.

Have fun!