SharePoint Online web template debugging

Question

I'm trying to develop a custom web template to use with SharePoint Online. I created an empty web online and saved it as a template (without content). I then loaded that WSP into Visual Studio and made some changes. The altered WSP is uploaded to the sandbox solution store and activates. So far, so good.

But now upon deployment, something goes wrong. Ok, probably made a mistake somewhere: but where? The error is not really informing and there's no way to look in the logs for SharePoint online (at least not that I know of).

So I then tried deploying the same solution to an on premise SharePoint environment to be able to debug things. But apparantly, SharePoint Online activates a bunch of features which are unavailable in an onpremise installation. They're included in the template, so when I now try to create a site in my onpremise environment, it's complaining about missing features.

I'm getting a bit lost here. What's a good way to debug these things?

Answer 1

There is no good way to debug in SharePoint online. You basically have two options

• Remove/add pieces of declarative content one at a time to rule out any failing parts
• If you have code that do the provisioning, use a list to log all exceptions.

Answer 2

Have a look at this

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2011/05/31/mvps-for-sharepoint-2010-debugging-techniques-for-sharepoint-online-applications.aspx

Answer 3

Ok scratch that answer. I obviously didnt read your question well enough before answering :(

What I would do to debug is to import the package into Visual Studio 2010 (import WSP SharePoint 2010 Project type). Then I would track down feature ID's that are missing and try to get some info on them by googling the GUID.

If need be, comment these features out in the web templates ONET.XML, if they really are SPOL only (there are a chance that the error you are experiencing is related to the features as well, but disabling them will bring you a step further if it is not).

After disabling the SPOL features, package the solution and deploy it as a Sandboxed Solution.