Professional SharePoint® 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

326

❘

CHAPTER 11 DEPLOYING BRANDING IN SHAREPOINT

DEPLOYING UNCUSTOMIZED FILES USING FEATURES

AND SOLUTIONS

So far, this chapter has presented a high-level discussion about your various options for deploying

fi les, as well as the impact of customized and uncustomized fi les. Obviously, deploying fi les in a cus-

tomized fashion is pretty easy: You simply manually upload them through the SharePoint UI or with

SPD. But what if you want to deploy your fi les in an uncustomized state — how would you do that?

Features

The primary mechanism used to provision uncustomized instances of fi les in SharePoint is called a

feature. A feature enables a developer to deploy fi les and other site customizations or functionality

to a site collection or individual site. Once activated, the feature deploys the fi les to SharePoint in an

uncustomized state.

Although they have a generic-sounding name, features refer to something very specifi c in SharePoint.

Every feature includes a

Feature.xml fi le that provides basic information (title, description, scope of

deployment, etc.), a unique ID, and the name and location for an assembly or one or more element

manifest fi les. The element manifest fi le (called

elements.xml by default in Visual Studio 2010) is

what describes to SharePoint where to deploy the various fi les contained in the feature. When an

assembly is referenced, it can be written to deploy fi les t