SharePoint 2007 - do it the feature way

When developing for Wss3 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 you don't create your own installers anymore, you build features and solutions. Getting started with this is still a difficult task because there is so much to take into account. The best way to get started are samples, and I just stumbled across a project at CodePlex by the well known SharePoint books writer Scot Hillier with the well chosen name "features". It is packed with feature projects, some donated by the community.

Another nice sample is from http://sharepointsolutions.com/. I can never find this sample on their site, but I always find it through Google codesearch (http://www.google.com/codesearch). When you search for Feature.xml and SharePoint you find it.. direct link: http://shop.sharepointsolutions.com/shared/SPSolutions.Demo.zip

At Macaw we have our complete own way of building SharePoint Features and Solution files, all within a very automated process that supports both development deployment to keep the development cycle time to a minium, and package deployment that builds our features and solutions files. It is part of our Macaw Solutions Factory. I might write more about this at a later time.