So the session videos are up for MIX09.

It’s video and screen casts …. which means you can watch me deftly dancing across the stage in my yellow Crocs. Both sessions are a bunch of fun! Well worth taking a look at.

Building Accessible RIAs in Microsoft Silverlight
http://sessions.visitmix.com/MIX09/T65M

State of the Art in Web Site Design on Microsoft SharePoint
http://sessions.visitmix.com/MIX09/C20F

Thanks to all who came to my session at MIX on doing great Theme design for SharePoint.

I promised I’d post up some bits after the session so here they are.

I showed some useful snippets in the session. These were used when we created our Feature Receiver.

These two snippets basically create the code required to add our theme into and take it out of the SPThemes.xml when we install and uninstall the feature..

The Macro I showed for creating the 12 Hive structure in VS.NET is in this post here.

I mentioned Heather Solomon’s CSS Reference Guide for SharePoint here.

I also talked about the March CTP of VSeWSS 1.3 and a pack of 10 Themes for SharePoint that we’ve put together. Both are linked to from a post by Paul Andrew- his blog is well worth having in your RSS reader.

I think that’s about it. If I promised anything else please let me

So VSeWSS doesn’t provide a Visual Studio project type to create Themes.

So we have to start out with a SharePoint –> Blank Project.

Then we add a Root File

Then we need to create a structure something like this (if we want to be nicely multilingual aware)
 

So creating these by hand is a bit of a pain in the arse… especially if you have to do it during a presentation (come to my presentation at MIX09! ‘State of the Art in Web Site Design on Microsoft SharePoint’).

So I wrote a little Macro that creates these folders for you… thought it might be useful to some people.

    Sub TemporaryMacro()
        Dim themeName As String = InputBox("Enter the template name")
        Dim rootItem As ProjectItem = DTE.Solution.Projects.Item(1).ProjectItems.Item(2)
        Dim templateItem As ProjectItem = rootItem.ProjectItems.AddFolder("TEMPLATE")
        templateItem.ProjectItems.AddFolder("THEMES").ProjectItems.AddFolder(themeName)
        templateItem.ProjectItems.AddFolder("LAYOUTS").ProjectItems.AddFolder("1033") _
            .ProjectItems.AddFolder("IMAGES").ProjectItems.AddFolder(themeName)
    End Sub

Hope it’s helpful for people.