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One of my pain points as a SharePoint “administrator” is having to deal with deployments of solution packages to my environment without the best change management. This means that I often see packages making their way in to the environment without any thought given to keeping the package in case it needs to be reapplied at a later time (Note: I’m not the only one who controls what goes into the environment).

The solution? I whipped up a Windows application so download one, several, or all of the solution packages currently stored in the farm configuration database.

I have posted the application to CodePlex @ http://spsolutiondownloader.codeplex.com/.

The application must be run in the context of a Farm Administrator (i.e. right-click, Run As…) on a server in the farm for which you wish to download the solution package(s) from and requires the .NET Framework 3.5.

I would love some feedback from the community as to whether or not this useful. I have some other little apps in mind I could put together with the proper motivation.

Spencer Harbar presented an excellent webcast on content deployment in SharePoint 2007 yesterday. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about it, now is the time.

Go check it out.

Reza Alirezaei has a good post on the behind the scenes of CAS policies and SharePoint.

Check it out.

Over at the Development Hole, the HubKey crew has been busy building out a SharePoint API that mimics the internal SharePoint object model.

If you have ever felt the pain of having to have a SharePoint instance/farm/installation available to run your code again, you’ll appreciate what HubKey is doing. You can grab a beta of their API here (select HubKey SharePoint API as your interest).