SharePoint 2010: solution/feature upgrade recommended practices

Question

this is kind of an open question: I'm trying to define for a team a set of recommended practices for delivering a SharePoint solution in stages. That means, changes will happen at every level (solution, feature, web part, content types, etc).

On your experience, which are the practices that really, really, worked for you guys? For ex. using upgrade custom actions, placing upgrade logic entirely on FeatureUprading event handlers? Or in FeatureActiving handlers and assume features could already exist? Else?

I'm asking because I know of projects that follow The Word on this from many MSDN articles and still, upgrades are kind of nightmarish to manage, and those processes are sometimes difficult to grasp for average devs.

Thanks!

Answer 1

As no one else has ventured an answer, my current approach is:

1. Use the declarative approach for those cases where it works 100% of the time eg NOT content types

2. Fall back to code for the rest

3. Always write the related code so that it can be run multiple times against either the pre- or post-upgrade state