Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Best Practices

Branding Using Visual Studio 2005

Creating a SharePoint branded Web site that is consistent across the entire SharePoint Server 2007 farm requires making changes to the files stored in the SharePoint server’s 12 hives. Because SharePoint Designer 2007 cannot open pages directly from the file system, these pages must be edited in some other way. For many of these files, a simple editor like Notepad.exe can be used, but Visual Studio 2005 provides the best environment for these files. Using Visual Studio 2005, it is possible for you to create all of the files necessary to implement a custom brand, including master pages, layout pages, CCS, and JavaScript files. But more importantly, Visual Studio 2005 allows the creation of features, solutions, ...