Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

A.2. Building a Custom Solution Using the VSeWSS

In order to appreciate how VSeWSS can improve the SharePoint development experience by eliminating some of the cyclical activities involved in creating a SharePoint solution, it is best to build a robust example solution employing all of the options that VSeWSS offers. This appendix provides a detailed overview of VSeWSS architecture, showing each element that composes VSeWSS, as well as demonstrating some portions that can be extended to include various enterprise development standards, and explaining how each of the faculties that the extensions provide can be exploited to its maximum potential to construct robust, effective, manageable business solutions (see Figure A-1). The end result, achieved solely by using VSeWSS, is a powerful, easily deployable, manageable corporate policy management site that leverages all of the custom solutions created.

This section starts by building the foundation for a corporate policy management site using a custom Site Definition Project Template, which can provision the new site with appropriate assets needed for global deployment scenarios. Within the site, there will be particular custom files that ought to be included with the rest of the custom content; therefore, the definition of a custom module to be packaged with the Site Definition is provided. Second, a new content type will be generated, since the policy library used for corporate policies will have specific properties (columns), policy ...