What are Sharepoint(MOSS 2007) Developement/Deployment best practices

Question

We are deploying sharepoint MOSS 2007 at our work. I\'m trying to come up with a sharepoint development and deployment methodology. We have Dev/QA/Prod environments and I ne

Answer 1

SharePoint development / deployment isn't as finely tuned as it is with regular .NET. I haven't heard of anyone using CI solutions for this.

Your basic unit of deployment is a solution package (a WSP file). It's basically a CAB file with a different extension. WSPBuilder is helpful for creating them. (http://wspbuilder.codeplex.com)

SPSource (http://spsource.codeplex.com) is pretty good for reverse engineering some stuff that you build in a web browser, such as Content Types and Lists. It's my preferred way of doing this stuff - trying to cut them by hand is no fun. I've had SPSource reverse engineer simple lists into 2000 line XML files.

Powershell is important for SPT 2010. James Kovacs has built a build tool called psake which plugs into PSH. It looks pretty straightforward, though I need to figure out PSH properly first.

Spend some time on http://sharepointdevwiki.com as this an evolving resource.

Microsoft patterns and practices group have released some guidance as well at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203468.aspx

LearnDevNow.com is also selling online training videos that are pretty good and very affordable (about USD100). They will show you many of the good ways of doing things.

Cheers Mike