Packaging and Deployment in SharePoint Foundation

Last modified: April 09, 2010

Applies to: SharePoint Foundation 2010

You can package functionality in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation by using a farm solution or sandboxed solution. In SharePoint development, a solution is a deployable, reusable package that can contain Features, site definitions, and other functionality. You can enable or disable solutions individually. Both farm solutions and sandboxed solutions are packaged in a .cab file with the .wsp extension.

A Feature is a piece of functionality that can be deployed to a front-end Web server in SharePoint Foundation. A Feature can be scoped to multiple levels—Web, site, Web application, and server farm. A Feature consists of a Feature.xml file and one or more element manifest (Elements.xml) files that define the elements that make up the Feature.