WSPBuilder Extensions is an add-in that works with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, developed by Carsten Keutmann with help from Tom Clarkson who developed the Visual Studio Templates. Thanks to them, SharePoint Development will not have to be as time consuming or cumbersome as it used to be. Now we have yet another reason to feel more comfortable and at ease inside Visual Studio 2008.
WSPBuilder Extensions is a welcome competitor to the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio Extensions which has not been updated since the release of Visual Studio 2008. Using the WSPBuilder for development simplifies coding by:
- Eliminating the need to create a manifest.xml file, it does automatically for you!
- Creating and Naming the WSP solution file based on the manifest.xml file created by the tool itself. The naming is based on the name of the folder in which the project resides
- Providing the following useful Tasks:
- Build WSP
- Deploy
- Upgrade
- Uninstall
- Build WSP
- Copy a file to the 12 hive
- Recycling the AppPools from the Visual Studio interface!
WSPBuilder Extensions installs two Visual Studio templates that are available only for Visual C#:
From Doug Ortiz's Blog
When Right-Clicking the project an additional item is added with the following tasks:
From Doug Ortiz's Blog
While it does not do everything for you ( no tool does! ), it certainly is re-defining and setting the standards higher. Hopefully, this posting will spark SharePoint Developers interest to take a look WSPBuilder Extensions. A big plus is that it's free!
WSPBuilder Extensions is available for download at: http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder.
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