Building SharePoint solution files can be a complex and time consuming chore.  Yet, learning the details on how to create and package your own SharePoint solution package (.wsp) file is something every SharePoint developer should know.

 

Thanks to Carsten Keutmann, the time it takes for you to create a SharePoint solution package has just been drastically cut.  Keutmann has created a tool called WSPBuilder that makes packaging a .wsp file so easy – you simply cannot go without it.  It will save you many, many, hours of development time.  For example.  I needed to package up Telerik controls for use in SharePoint.  This literally took me about 10 minutes.  Ten minutes to package about 1286 files in 142 folders, create the .ddf file, create the manifest.xml file – of course, I didn’t have to do any of this.  The effort to do this by hand would have taken me several hours.

 

Great tool Keutmann!  Developers, you’ll find it on CodePlex – and you’ll be very happy to have it.