Use the Tools that are Available

As I said in a previous post, building features and solutions can be pretty time consuming and manual. At one point I believed that it would take nearly half of the development time of a project to create the features and solutions to deploy the project to a production environment.

That was until I found tools that help speed and ease custom development for SharePoint. One of these tools is the SharePoint Solution Generator. If you download the Visual Studio extensions for WSS this tool comes as part of the package. This tool allows you to create your custom lists and sites using the UI and then run the utility to pull those customizations into feature XML and list and site templates. You can then take these generated Visual Studio projects and build a solution that can e deployed to a production server, or staging area. This also helps to make sure that your project deploys the way you want it to.

The next tool is the Visual Studio extensions for WSS 3.0 or (VSeWSS). This extension to Visual Studio aids in building features and solutions. It adds new project templates such as List Definition, Blank Site Definition, and Web Part. These templates will generate the feature.xml and elements.xml files for you and populate them with some of the items you need to create a list or site. The extensions also allow you to build a solution from the project and deploy it to a site.

I did find some limitations in the 1.0 version of the extensions that really limit what types of projects you would be able to use them for. You are not able to modify the manifest.xml file for the solution so this limits adding template files and additional assemblies.

With these limitations I did not think I could use the extensions for the project I was working on until I found that there was a CTP of the 1.1 version of the extensions. This was greatly improved over the 1.0 version. You can now modify the manifest.xml file and there are additional templates to help speed your development. These include the Content Type, List Definition from Content Type, Template, and Module templates. Pretty much anything you can do with features and solutions, you can now do with the Extensions. There are still a couple of limitations to them that should be fixed by the release version. These are, that if you add code files to the project they will not be built into the solution unless you add a event receiver to the project. Another is that there is no way to deploy files to the _layouts folder, yet. They promise this in the release version. Also the features have the GUIDs appended to their names, but this will be removed by release time.

I find this version to work well for many of the project types that I have and will definitely speed up my SharePoint development life cycle.

For additional information on the extensions and how to use them:

Chris Johnson's Blog
Chris O'Brien's Blog