Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

Chapter 4. WSS v3 Platform Services

By Dan Attis

Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0 (WSS v3) offers developers an immense set of features that can be leveraged to customize and extend its out-of-the-box functionality. This chapter explores how you can use these features to create customized solutions to solve complex problems while adding tremendous business value to some of the out-of-the-box functionality discussed in other chapters.

Throughout the course of this chapter, you will become familiar with the following concepts:

• Site Definitions

• Custom field types

• Features

• Solutions

• Web Parts

To help explain why all of these seemingly disparate topics are discussed in the same chapter, imagine the following scenario. Suppose that you created a Custom Field Type to be used on a list of your choosing, had a custom Web Part that talked to an external system, and needed a custom Site Definition to ease the creation of your custom sites by placing the appropriate Web Parts on the home page among other things. All three of these could be packaged into a Feature and deployed via a Solution. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the possibilities and is only meant to demonstrate how these five topics may end up being related in your custom solution. Each of them could be created and deployed independently as well, if that was desired.

All of the examples and demonstrations in this chapter utilize what can be referred to as a manual approach to development and deployment. With respect ...