Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

4.6. Summary

This chapter touched on many of the extensibility points that Windows SharePoint Services v3 (WSS v3) offers. It discussed the structure and content of Site Definitions and how powerful they are when used to provision sites within WSS v3, as well as custom field types and how they can be leveraged to add additional data input and validation options to a WSS v3 list. You reviewed two of the newest additions to the WSS v3 development family: the Feature and Solution Frameworks, and learned about the multitude of elements available when building Features as well as how they are scoped and deployed. Next you explored Solutions, now the preferred way to handle the deployment of many of the SharePoint components, including all of the ones just mentioned. A brief overview of Web Parts glanced over their infrastructure as well as design and security. Finally, you created a sample of each of these components. From the knowledge gained in this chapter, you should now be empowered and motivated to create solutions to the business problems you face using any number of the extensibility points that WSS v3 Framework provides.