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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T21:23:22+00:00

I feel like I need a better defined framework for updating my SharePoint (MOSS

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I feel like I need a better defined framework for updating my SharePoint (MOSS 2007) application with custom code changes. I am creating wsp solution files with features and new types and such, but once those get tested and deployed, I feel like it’s a bit of a leap of faith, and that makes me nervous and occasionally reluctant to deploy changes. After deployment, it’s difficult to correlate the current state of the SharePoint application with the specific code that is deployed on that SharePoint server. What features are actually installed and on which sites? Which features are activated or deactivated? Which version of this custom field or content type is really there? Things like this. If an error crops up, I have to rely on my assumptions about what code is there and actually running, or I have to spend time digging through deployed assemblies and the 12 hive — not impossible, but pretty unpleasant.

What steps should I take to improve my ability to unambiguously determine the state of the application and find the code that truly represents that state? Are there third-party tools that can help with this?

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  1. Editorial Team

    I feel your pain… Application Developyment Lifecycle with SharePoint 2007 leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

    To answer your question. We built our own deployment utility that does a few things for us.

    1. Checks state of key Timer Jobs (too many times we would do a deployment to find one WFE that did not get deployment)

    2. Checks state of key Services on all our web front ends (again we want to know health of farm before we start kicking off timer jobs).

    3. Shows file version and date of selected assemblies from GAC (does this across all Web Front Ends). We have seen problems before where assemblies did not get installed correctly across the farms.

    4. Updates web.config settings based on an custom XML scheme we provide. We ran into some problems with web.config updates so we have thought about creating a utility to validate the web.config (specifically make sure there are no duplicate entries for specific keys).

    5. Push content type updates (first time content types are deployed via feature it works great, but as soon as you need to update that content type it gets tough).

    6. Checks status of WSP package after deployment or upgrade.

    This utility uses the SharePoint API to do most of this work. Some of it is done by checking WMI Events.

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