Inside Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0

Application Deployment Through Features

Features are the preferred packaging mechanism for SharePoint components. We have used features for deploying sample code throughout this book for the simple reason that they are easy to activate within existing sites and also have object and event models that are very powerful. A feature can be activated with a WSS site in five ways: through the Site Settings Web pages, the STSADM command line, site definition references, feature activation dependencies, or feature stapling. Because we have already looked at the first three options, we will now look at using feature activation dependencies and feature stapling.

Feature Activation Dependencies

Features can include activation dependencies. When WSS activates ...