And at this point you may hear a mental click as you see how the feature.xml file is "run," which points to the newly GAC'd assembly and its primary class, which has a FeatureActivated method that begins the programmatic act of following your commands. Once this file has been run with the STADM component you should be able to activate your new feature. Open the site, Site Settings, Site Features and if all went well, somewhere in your list should be your new feature. Take a moment to activate and deactivate it and enjoy the knowledge that you now have the framework for your feature. Of course it does not do much at this time, but let us review.

1.    Declarative Functionality – Back in the feature.xml file you have the ability to reference a file called elements.xml. This file allows you to declaratively create lists, build fields and attributes, populate the lists with text data or point to data files to load into lists, build custom menu items and much more. The declarative functionality of this file (or files if you add and reference more element files) is quite extensive. In some ways this functionality is similar to running an SQL script file that builds the tables, fields, attributes and populates the data. Part two of this article will cover many examples.

2.    Programmatic Functionality – The next part of this article will also cover how the ReceiverAssembly and ReceiverClass objects call .NET code to respond to events using the FeatureActivated, FeatureDeactivating, FeatureInstalled and FeatureUninstalling methods. These methods, along with their associated properties, become a gateway between your code and SharePoint.

3.    ASP.NET – As you have probably already learned, SharePoint is based on ASP.NET, and as such the whole array of ASP.NET functionality is at your disposal. In the process of building a SharePoint feature you can include not only assemblies, but ASPX and ASCX objects, in addition to exposing canned and custom functionality via ASMX and WCF.