Peter Reavy's tech stuff

This Best Practices article at MSDN also discusses how to use the System.Web.Caching.Cache object to store data.

Ultimately, though, not every behavior or kind of change you’d want to implement can be expressed in XML.  For this reason, you can also define a feature receiver which contains callbacks which will get fired when the Feature is installed or activated.

Mike Ammerlaan's Blog

I want to make note of this piece on Backup, Restore, High Availability and Disaster Recovery. The author, Joel Oleson, also has a great post about Replication and High Availability.

Courtesy of the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog.

Bob Mixon and Patrick Tisseghem have responded thoughtfully to some bitter criticism of SharePoint.

The bad news is that modifying the application.master in the TEMPLATE/LAYOUTS directory is not recommended and in fact will result in an unsupported SharePoint installation

says Michael Yeager, who also links to Microsoft's own guidelines for Site Definition customizations.

 I have an idea what a Feature is in WSS v3 and how to create a custom Feature.

You have to create a folder for the custom Feature under the 12 hive's TEMPLATE\FEATURES directory. This must contain a feature.xml file. This file has an ElementsManifest element, which lists other XML files, one for each element in the feature. And these subsequent XML files are the ones which define the customisations you want to make.

To add a Feature to a site, that appears to be it. Then dependent on the scoping defined in your feature.xml, you can just activate it on a site through a button under Site Administration.

For the above, I am indebted to the mighty Pattison and Larson.

I understand that it would be possible to add a Feature to a custom Site Definition and create sites based on that.

But there is also something called Feature Stapling which seems worth investigation. It seems to be a way to attach a Feature to one of Microsoft's Site Definitions in such a way that you don't have to tamper with Microsoft's stuff.

Finally I've been grappling with this slightly more advanced example of a custom feature implementation back over at Todd Baginski's blog.