SharePoint Solution Deployment

Abstract

This chapter will focus on best practices for deploying your SharePoint 2010 customizations developed with Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint 2010 tools. This chapter does not provide an introduction to the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint 2010 tools that automate much of the work to create features and solutions (WSP files). It is assumed you already know what SharePoint features and solutions are, and that you have a good hands-on working knowledge of how to create these in Visual Studio 2010. Rather, this chapter will demonstrate some best practices that will encourage you to carefully plan out the structure of your Visual Studio solutions, SharePoint features, and SharePoint solutions. Here are some of the best practices that will be covered in this chapter:

• 1. Think deployment first! Plan your Visual Studio Solution, SharePoint solution, and SharePoint feature strategy carefully.

• 2. Plan to maintain your application with feature versioning and feature upgrading.

• 3. Define your feature and solution activation dependencies.

• 4. Automate the provisioning of your solutions and features with PowerShell.

• 5. Defined lists should be backed with schema defined in content types.

• 6. Sign all of your Visual Studio projects with the same Strong Name Key (SNK) file

• 7. Feature Stapling is a great way to enhance out of the box site definitions.