Building and Debugging SharePoint Solutions
In general, building and debugging SharePoint solutions is the same as building and debugging other types of projects in Visual Studio. The topics in this section explain the differences that do exist.
Building SharePoint solutions creates assemblies and a solution package (.wsp) file. The following table shows the locations of these files during a build.
Build item | Output folder |
|---|---|
Assembly, program database (PDB), and .wsp files. | ProjectName\bin\debug or ProjectName\bin\release |
SharePoint project item files. | ProjectName\pkg\debug or ProjectName\pkg\release |
Build intermediate files. | ProjectName\obj\debug or ProjectName\obj\release |
Package intermediate files. | ProjectName\pkgobj\debug or ProjectName\pkgobj\release |
To build SharePoint solutions, the development computer must have the correct version of SharePoint server installed. Otherwise, building SharePoint solutions is the same as building other types of projects in Visual Studio. For more information, see How to: Build SharePoint Solutions.
Before debugging, Visual Studio copies the .wsp package to the SharePoint server, activates the Site and Web-scoped Features, and in some cases, starts the project. In other cases, you may have to open the project manually. For more information, see Troubleshooting SharePoint Solutions and Debugging SharePoint Solutions.
To package or deploy SharePoint solutions, Visual Studio must have permission to copy files to the SharePoint server. You must run Visual Studio as an elevated process, and your user account must be a Site Collections Administrator on the SharePoint server. In addition, you must specify whether your project is a sandboxed solution or a farm solution. For more information, see Differences Between Sandboxed and Farm Solutions.