3 Quick Steps to Transform a SharePoint 2010 Solution into a SharePoint 2013 Solution

While working with SharePoint 2010 environment, we tend to build many farm based solutions according to the needs of our application. These may contain farm level feature, site collection level feature, web parts, custom list definition and stuff like that.

In order to convert our complete web applications to SharePoint 2013 environment, for sure we need to update all our solution to the recent SharePoint 2013 environment. There are many things that need to be considered here. Let’s look at some of these:

Step 1

Surely the first step would be to transform or solution from Visual Studio 2010 to Visual Studio 2012. May be you already have your solution on VS 2012, in that case, this step can be ignored and skipped. If no then just follow the wizards to transform our solution to VS 2012. There may be some warnings or errors that need to be removed to complete this transfer from VS 2010 to VS 2012.

In this step, we have to make sure that we have all the required developer tools installed for SharePoint. Launch the web platform installer and search for SharePoint the new developer tools should show up in the search like shown below.  Install it as it will be very much the must thing to have before the start.

SharePoint 2013 Solution

Web Platform Installer

Step 2

The second most important step will be to transform all the assembly references from .Net 3.5 to .Net 4 and above. Most important assemblies would be Microsoft. BusinessData.dll, Microsoft.Office.Server.dll, Microsoft.Office.Server.dll, and Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.dll just to name a few. The following steps overall has to be followed:

  • If the solution is from a source control, check out complete solution
  • Then change the project’s target platform from 3.5 to 4.5, this will be done by opening up .sln file and changing the target framework to 4.5 from 3.5 manually
  • In the post scripts if there is a script for assembly registration, point it to the correct version of gacutil
  • Now an error will be prompted that the App pool cannot be recycled, this will be there as the user has to be added as db_owner of the web application

Once all the above is done, the solution would be upgraded successfully.

Step 3

Now that the solution has been transferred to VS 2012 and all the assemblies have been transformed too. The next challenge will be to update all path references that we have made in code. So we have to add /15/ in all folder paths for control template, images, CSS, javascript files. Also he reference of assembly in application pages have to be updated. There might be some other minor updates required like RegistePluggableSecurityTrimmer has four (4) parameters instead of three (3) parameters. The method call ExecuteOrDelayUntilScipLoaded() method call also has to be changed to SP.SOD.eecuteFunc. Depending upon your application, these different kind of things need to be updated.

In a nutshell it involves certain steps that can make it happen but it is not a very lengthy process and understanding of the updates in any API calls before his activity can surely make this whole process faster.

Usman Akram is an experienced IT Professional with over 10 years experience in Microsoft technologies especially SharePoint. Usman has delivered several large and complex projects including integration of SharePoint with BizTalk and with Dynamics CRM. Other then SharePoint Usman has also managed a BigData analytic project (HDInsight/Hadoop).

SharePoint 2013 Solution by Usman Akram

Usman Akram

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