Infopath in Team environment with VS.NET 2003 - how to ?

[Paja]

Hello all,

has anybody experienced team development of Infopath application with VS.NET
2003 ? My coleague made new solution, with three infopath projects. He added
this solution to Source Safe - all files appeared there. Then I wanted to get
solution and its files from Source Safe through VS.NET ("Add project from
Source Control" menu item), but I got message "The operation could not be
completed because the
Infopath project does not contain a form definition file (.xsf). Please
ensure that the form definition file is added to your project."

Then I got files directly from the SS client, but after I try to build
project, I got error message "The
form template 'manifest.xsf' references a file 'InfoPathProject1.dll' that
does not exist". But the assembly InfoPathProject1.dll was in project Bin
directory.

If you have some advices, how to correctly set up the tem environment, it
would be great to hear it from you. Thank you

Best regards,
Paja

 

[G. Tarazi]

Hi



I am using it in a team environment (10 developers), multiple InfoPath forms
/ C# .net, SharePoint C# in the background.



The product itself is not supporting VSS, we had a lot of problems about
that, and we end up writing our custom scripts, and we use the scripts to
check out - check in only the modified files to source safe



During the check out, the scripts are modifying the path of the form inside
the xsf file, removing the read only from the files, etc.



The product is not designed for a tem environment; we suffered a lot until
we got use to it.



Since it seams you are developing a product, here is some advice:



1- Don't use the schema event handlers (on after change and of before
change) each of them will slow down the startup speed of your form (only in
managed code), use 2 event handlers instead on the top element, and redirect
the events yourself. (InfoPath bug that Microsoft don't care to fix)

2- The button event handlers are fine.

3- Use the fully trusted forms (when possible), otherwise prepare to
multiply your development time by 3, you will lose a lot of time for simple
things, how to popup something to the end user for example, etc.

4- Don't build large forms, split the forms to multiple views, otherwise
your forms will become extremely slow.

5- Advice you users not to paste much in the rich text boxes, a simple
copy and paste from excel to InfoPath will result in a half megabyte form,
which won't be a problem if it was binary, but a big problem when it is
xhtml into the InfoPath dom.

6- Use VS.NET to build the schemas, and then use them in InfoPath.

7- Don't use datasets, and believe me on that, they are slow on the C#
code (large forms), and InfoPath does not support them 100%, you will suffer
(We end up writing our custom tool, to generate C# code from a schema, in a
way we can use it and InfoPath happy with it.).

8- Learn how to preserve xsl, InfoPath often will lose the conditional
formatting, and without preserving things, your work will be lost over and
over.

9- If your project is big, prepare your self for custom tools, we
created 3 by now, a VSS / VS.NET add-in for the source control, and 2 other
tools that we use internally to manipulate the xsl <-> C# <-> VS.NET





Good luck, and welcome to the club