STSDEV – Pure Genius

When I am in SharePoint Admin (Nazi) mode, I flatly refuse to accept any significant customisation/code changes unless they are packaged up as a solution that is activated via features. Some developers hate this and feel I am being “difficult” and I get the old chestnut excuse “oh but this will now take me twice as long to do“. I have little sympathy for them, and in fact I see this as a good test of whether a developer has a decent appreciation or understanding of governance.

This is because all they are doing increasing my governance risk because they do not want to do the extra work to make their work easier to deploy/ upgrade/retract etc. The risk increases exponentially when you maintain a farm with several WFE servers.

When consulting to clients, I deliberately try to scare the crap out of younger developers who are been earmarked to work with SharePoint and try and instil a sense of what governance is all about. These sorts of considerations tend not be given too much thought until you have been through something bad happening 🙂

So when Yoda Sezai put me onto a codeplex project called STSDEV, I took a look and was very, very impressed.

Now all you developers have no excuses!! Stop what you are doing and go to codeplex and watch the introduction video right now!

I like it so much, I’m thinking of now mandating that all development is performed via STSADM projects 🙂

CleverWorkArounds Rating: Exceptional