Provide a customer an upgradeable SharePoint solution containg content types, list templates and so on

Question

currently I'm developing a SharePoint solution for a customer, which contains the following:

• A custom field type
• Two content types (one containing lookup fields to the list which is using the other content type)
• Two lists templates, each based on one of the custom content type
• Two list instances, based each on the provided list template

One of the content types is using a custom form via template approach.

Each of this is provided in a single feature which are all packed in on solution package.

As far as I can tell, one of the content types/list template/instance is far away from being final and my guess is that a lot of columns will be removed and added during the early stage of the project. What about rolling back an update?

As I have absolutely no access to the SharePoint installation the customer is using, I must provide every update to the content type and list template via a solution package.

After I have read a few resources about upgrading features, I'm living in fear that this project might have a catastrophic outcome, as testability and workflows for updating a feature are a huge mess.

Has anybody good resources for this process? What about new installations, when my feature already contains several updates? What about developing? As far as I know I will lose the ability to simply press F5 in Visual Studio, because VS will always retract the solution.

At the moment I'm totally confused how to handle this. Has anybody done something similar before?

Answer 1

We have exactly the same case as yours, our production and beta environments are not in our hand and we have to do deployments using WSP solution package (even if those are updates to existing solutions)

We also use content types, site columns and list definitions and instances, all declarative..

For the updates (I'm not sure if this is the best method but it works great in our environment), we usually write a Code Upgrader feature and the updates like deletion of site columns and updates in columns etc. we do programmatically in this feature and push changes to lists (includes content types being used in lists/libraries).. With this, we also update the declarative XML content types, list definitions etc. to match our new update..

The problem with content types declarative deployment is that the changes are not pushed to the lists/libraries using the content type and you need to programmatically push those changes (calling Update method with true attribute)..

Each time a new update is to be made, we usually comment out or completely delete (since using Version Control) the Code Upgrader feature code and write the new updates..