Sharepoint Development Process Best Practices

Question

I would like to ask some simple questions regarding the best practices of Sharepoint 2010 development process.

1) I am supposed to maintain and add new sites to an already installed Sharepoint site. Currently, as far as, there is no test environment but production site. Is there any way to use a "Production site" as a development and test site? Did you have such an experience?

2) How can i import a site into VS 2010 ? As far as I know the current production site has only customisations made via the Sharepoint GUI.

3) What would be the best project structure for a site? A single project with all the Sharepoint items defined in it or what else?

4) How should I use Sharepoint designer? First design everything in the designer and then export to VS2010 or what else? I know that I cannot export anything from VS 2010 to SP designer?

Answer 1

1. For your first point, it depends on what you mean by "development". Luis's answer is absolutely correct if development = code. But, if by development you mean you want to build out a site with lists, libraries, and such, test it, refine it, and then build a live version, then by all means just create a site on the prod box to do this. Just set up permissions so that only the test users can get to it, and make set the title to something where those folks will clearly know they're on the dev/test site.

2. This is an advanced option. If you need to ask about what SharePoint designer does, then you probably don't have enough experience to be doing this. (Most customizations can be made without importing the site into Visual Studio.)

3. It depends on what you're trying to do. But in general, don't put everything in one project, as versioning becomes difficult.

4. Again, it depends on what you're trying to do.

Answer 2

1. Bad practice, nobody ever develops on a production environment, if your company does not have enough resources to have at least 3 separate environments, then they should not even have sharepoint installed.

2. In vs, there is an import site project wizard.

3. There is no specific answer for this but: but this is a good start: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vesku/archive/2010/10/14/sharepoint-2010-and-web-templates.aspx

4. If you are developer, never use sp designer, use always VS, sp designer is really for business users and everything you develop in sp designer is inmediately deployed, you dont have control over a deployment process if you use sp designer.