How to Build and Deploy the Application on the Server in SharePoint Designer

Now, that I have modified the properties of the Enhanced Team Site, I want to build it and then deploy it on the server. To do so, I simply use the native tools inside of Visual Studio. I am going to click on the Build command and choose Build Enhanced Team Site. I can watch the build progress down at the bottom left. The build is succeeded.

Now, that the build succeeded, I can click on Build again and choose Deploy Enhanced Team Site. Here again, I can watch the status down at the bottom-left. I can see here that the deploy succeeded. So I know that that site definition is now available on the server. What I want to do is go take a look at what was created in my directory.

I am going to Alt+Tab back to the folder where the solution was originally created. Inside of this folder, I can double-click in the Bin directory, double-click the Debug directory and see the WSP file called Enhanced Team Site. This is really just a CAB. So I am going to rename this to CAB and open it.

Notice the directory structure here. I can see all the ASPX pages that are going to be created when the site definition is used to create the Team Site instance on the server. I can see all the feature.xml, the elementManifest.xml files, the full manifest.xml file as well as discussion boards for the Flat.aspx, the MyItems for tasks, lists etcetera, the MyItems.aspx page for the calendar and tasks and you can also see the path to each of these features.

If I expand this, you can see that each one contains the Guid. I will click Back and take a look at the Solution folder and you can see how these guids match. If I double-click on any one of these, you’ll see the pages involved in that guid. So if I double-click Announcements, for example, we can see the Announcements folder, the list templates and the feature involved in that folder.

When I double-click Announcements here, we can see the AllItems DisplayForm, EditForm, NewForm and the schema for the Announcements List. I will click back again and again and get us back into this folder where I can see the Enhanced Team Site tab and I am going to rename that back to WSP. I will click Yes that I do want to change the file name extension. I will go ahead and close out this folder now, which will bring us back to Visual Studio and now that I have created my event handlers, I want to go ahead and create some workflow actions that will also be called from within the site definition.