SandBox Solutions Deployment of WSP to Solution Gallery : Beginner Questions

Question

I am a beginner to SP Dev, and I have been reading a few things about Sandbox Solutions and the limitations there. Also it seems that to deploy a solution, I can simply upload a wsp to the solution gallery within a site collection and activate the feature?

So again I am new and if these questions lack context, that is really what I am after.....So if I develop say a basic webpart on a dev laptop with installation of SP, VS, etc, and I reference my local sharepoint implementation in the project do I need to somehow change this in order to upload the final packaged wsp to a production system? How would I do that? Can silverlight app be developed in this manner providing you just reference the dlls, and the are in the same location on both systems (guess there is no reason they shouldn't be?)?

Thanks for any advice/insight in this area. Appreciate as always!

Answer 1

Also it seems that to deploy a solution, I can simply upload a wsp to the solution gallery within a site collection and activate the feature?

Yes this is right.

So if I develop say a basic webpart on a dev laptop with installation of SP, VS, etc, and I reference my local sharepoint implementation in the project do I need to somehow change this in order to upload the final packaged wsp to a production system

No you don't need to do anything manually. When creating the project, you just have to specify that its a sandbox solution. (You can specify this in the project properties after you have created the project too). Visual Studio will take care of the rest. When you deploy this project, VS will automatically deploy it to the solution gallery of the mentioned site collection.

When you want to upload the WSP to your production, Simply take the WSP from the bin folder and upload it. You don't need to do any changes to it.

Can silverlight app be developed in this manner providing you just reference the dlls, and the are in the same location on both systems (guess there is no reason they shouldn't be?)

Absolutely you can. Have a look here: http://chrisforbesblogs.net/2010/08/11/deploying-a-silverlight-application-to-sharepoint-2010/ Plus there are lot of other tutorials available online for deploying Silverlight WebParts in the SharePoint Sandbox.