SharePoint 2010 Deployment with VS2010

Question

Looking for some guidance on best practices for SharePoint 2010 deployment. As of right now, our company has one Production server and 1 staging server that both run SharePoint 2010 Standard edition and me and 2 other developers have SharePoint standalone installed on our machines with Visual Studio 2010 installed.

I have found a lot of documentation on either deploying it, but stopping at the development level, which is great until you are ready for production OR very odd 10 step instructions on deploying to production or staging after you have tested and are ready to deploy not on your machine, but the actual server. Some say us a CAB file, some talk about a WSP file, but copying it to one place then editing files and it seems like there should be a like 2 step process tops to deploy an update to a web part. Anyone have a nice little best practices guide to this that I'm not finding?

I was also wondering, if you use the deploy feature to deploy locally, isn't there some way that you can change where you are deploying like an ASP.NET (Publish)??

Please help.

Answer 1

For me personally it's preferrable to go with .wsp deployment. And it rarely becomes to be a one-step process, unfortunately. You may want to review the following post for practices & advices:

Sharepoint Solution Deployment Strategies

Answer 2

When you're building sharepoint Solutions you should use WSP. A good place to start for SharePoint Development is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee513148.aspx

BTW when you build a WSP you can deploy it on any SharePoint server. By using PowerShell Remoting in conjunction with the Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell AddIn you can deploy WSPs from your machine accross the network.

Thorsten

Answer 3

For production and distribution the general approach is using a WSP file which is basically a CAB archive. From my point of view there are only 3 easy ways of deploying a WSP:

1. Use a script which executes the deployment commands (using STSADM.EXE or PowerShell).
2. Use a free SharePoint setup tool (most of them are limited or outdated).
3. Use a commercial SharePoint setup tool. This type of tools are pretty scarce for now, but they have more power.

For in-house deployment I recommend a script. For client distribution I recommend a setup tool.

Answer 4

You can use "Remote desktop Connection" to login to the server. Open the visual studio 2010 with the administrator account, then you can develop and deploy it