Cannot change welcome page through provisioning feature

Question

I am trying to provision a page to the sitepages folder (not that it needs to be in this folder) then change the welcome page to this page.

I have a feature which was in another package (project) that activated, but the welcome page did not change. Yet when I deactivated the feature and then reactivated it, the welcome page changed fine.

I now separated the feature into a project of its own and to start off, the new feature does not activate automatically even though I think I have it right. Yet when activate the feature manually, the welcome page is set correctly.

The setting are as follows:

active deployemnt configuration is set to default. Assembly depployment is set to GAC. the rest is true, false, site url, and none respectively.

Can anyone assist? If the code is required I shall be more than glad to provide it.

Thanks.

Godfrey

Answer 1

I'll make a couple of assumptions here:

• Since you're deploying to the GAC, I'll assume this is a Farm rather than a Sandbox solution
• You are deploying from Visual Studio, as in right-click -> deploy.

My advice to you would be to get into the practice of deploying a wsp using PowerShell, rather than Visual Studio, even in a development environment. Suppose your Visual Studio deployment had worked and turned on the Feature on the right site. You'd still need to write that deployment script before going into production.

With a scripted deployment you have complete control of exactly what happens in your deployment process, and when you move to production you'll minimize the occurrence of unexpected snags.

Corey Roth has the definitive guide on deploying solutions through PowerShell.