When developing an application based on SharePoint, a lot of the work goes into packaging and deployment. If you’re working as part of a team this becomes an even bigger problem since you need to be sure that your code can be deployed to each developers machine without causing mayhem and requiring a disproportionate amount of effort (quite literally two steps forward and three steps back!)

As it stands at the moment, CAML is a grand idea but it doesn’t go far enough when it comes to packaging complex solutions. It’s my aim to fill in the blanks, making it possible to package and deploy anything using features and declarative XML.

I’m hoping to put together a series of posts covering how to package pretty much everything in SharePoint. I’ll be covering the code required to extend CAML and providing a pile of installable WSP packages, allowing developers to get on with the task of developing custom code rather than re-inventing the wheel when it comes to packaging.

Now that’s big talk, only time will tell whether I actually achieve it!

I’ve already covered packaging Navigation in this article. My next stop is Security…