Best practices when deploying and updating your WSP farm solutions

Some WSP deployment gotchas:

• Always strong-name your assemblies, since that's a requirement for all full-trust code being run within SharePoint
• Always open a new PowerShell window after a deployment which updates DLLs in the GAC
  • Restart OWSTimer.exe so that timer jobs can see the new DLLs as well
  • In complex BCS scenarios, restarting the search service can also be required
• When in Visual Studio, to ensure correct packaging of your WSP solutions, you should always retract everything from the GAC - i.e. retract all you WSPs responsible for provisioning DLLs. This ensure that Visual Studio builds your projects with your project-folder-local dependencies instead of unexpectedly loading wrong-version DLLs from the GAC to use as build dependencies.

The risk associated with local packaging of SharePoint solution makes the use of a CI server to build your deployment artifacts a must, so strive to power through the challenges ahead of you to reach this state of bliss where you can say:

"I will never again build for prod on my developer machine"

Surely, something to be proud of. :)