Versioning and upgrading features with SharePoint 2010 [closed]

Question

I've been experimenting with feature version-ing and upgrading in Sharepoint 2010 and found a bunch of blogs, documentations etc. but it is still not very clear to me.

• How does Sharepoint store the feature versions? If I deploy more versions of a feature what happens to the old ones?
• When is update triggered, what triggers it, when does it do it automatically and when do I need to write code or update receivers?
• What should happen after the update with the elements that use the old feature (e.g. I have a content type with an element used by a list and I update the content type what happens to that list) etc.

Could someone explain all of this to me?

Answer 1

Chris O'Brien has covered this in a lot of depth on his blog: http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2010/06/feature-upgrade-part-1-fundamentals.html

If you still have specific questions, then it's recommend to open a separate question for each on this site, as we can then target specific answers, and this also helps other people find specific answers to their own questions.