Introducing CKS:Sandbox Tools Edition

Well, I know I know I've "gone dark" for the past few weeks and haven't blogged for a while .. I'm about knee deep in a very interesting global BI project (which I'm sure I'll be blogging about more soon) but this post is all about CKS (the Community Kit for SharePoint) and more specifically .. CKS:Sandbox.

In a nutshell the Community Kit for SharePoint is a set of best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code that enables practically anyone to create a community website based on SharePoint technology for practically any group of people with a common interest.
http://cks.codeplex.com/

My involvement is that I am going to be building a set of administrative tools for SharePoint 2010 Farm solutions to help admins to manage Sandbox Solutions.

This initial release is hopefully going to happen in July 2011 and the feature list is as follows:

Blocking of WSPs based on assemblies, based on provided limitations

• Enforced Public Key Tokens (for enforcement of specific signed assemblies, great to ONLY allow your internal development team to produce sandbox solutions)
• Enforced namespaces
• Enforced assembly names

Blocked file types list

• JS
• XAML
• DLL
• Etc ..

Override settings

• “Safe Publisher” (Solution ID) .. always allow regardless of above settings
• “Blacklist” list (Solution ID) .. always block regardless of above settings

Email Notification

• Allow emails to be sent to administrators if a solution is blocked
• Allow solutions to be deployed, but send an email instead of blocking it

You can find more (including release information and discussions) at our CodePlex site: http://ckssandbox.codeplex.com/

If you have any suggestions or comments, then please pass them on, and if you would like to be involved then by all means get in touch :)