Site Action Menu in SharePoint 2010 Programmatically Using VS 2012

Introduction

Today, in this article let's play around with one of the interesting and most useful concepts in SharePoint 2010.

Question: What is Site Action Menu?

In simple terms "It enables creation of a menu item with some action in the site actions menu using an empty element".

Step 1: Open SharePoint 2010 Central Administration and navigate to a specific site.

Step 2: Open up Visual Studio 2012 and create an "Empty SharePoint project":

Step 3: Select "Deploy as a farm solution" as in the following and click the "Finish" button. Now an empty project is created.

Step 4: Add a new empty element for that project.

Step 5: The complete code of Element.xml looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<CustomAction Id="SiteActionsToolbar"GroupId="SiteActions"Location="Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu"Sequence="1000"ImageUrl="http://cs411130.userapi.com/v411130244/994/FevM7PsZQnQ.jpg"Rights="FullMask"Title="Microsoft"Description=
"Click For Microsoft">
<UrlAction Url="http://www.microsoft.com"/>
</CustomAction>
</Elements>

Step 6: The output of the application looks like this:

I hope this article is useful for you.