Often I find developers writing custom batch scripts, stsadm commands to deploy their customizations ( Site definitions, field types, event receivers, workflow, and features) to MOSS staging/production farms. This is considered a very bad practice due to the following reasons (but not limited to):
1) A farm disaster happened but luckily you had your scripted backup of your farm. But when you restore, web parts are throwing errors
2) Unable to isolate the WebPart errors as the WebParts were manually installed
3) What about WebPart dependencies? Forgot to restore them!
4) Ok I got the WebPart somehow working (VS debugging etc) but wait where are the images?
5) What about the killer Web.config changes in new farm? Did you back that up too?
6) Now that you fixed the WebPart and customizations somehow, how will you deploy this fix to each server in the farm - manually? What if there are 16 servers in the farm?
Bottomline, always wrap up your customization as a solution package (WSP) prior to deploying to MOSS farm. Even your custom Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files, .aspx pages, and master pages will need to be deployed via WSP if they are to be used farm-wide. As a general rule, if the item in question will affect the entire farm it will likely need to be deployed via WSP.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment