Custom master page not refreshing upon deployment in Sharepoint 2010 Foundation

Question

I use VS2010 on Server 2008 R2 with Sharepoint 2010 Foundation.

I have created a custom master page following instructions from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg447066.aspx (activating my custom page as feature), and was delighted with the results. But as soon as I changed the images and attempted to deploy them through VS2010, I noticed that my changes were not showing in the page (which was still showing the old images).

Useful observations:

• It's a Sandboxed solution.
• I checked that wsp is built with the new images, and so it was.
• When I retract my solution, I also go to Master Page Gallery, and delete my custom master page from there to make sure I start from scratch. No difference.
• My SP Designer does not give me an option to "revert to site definition".
• My "Look and Feel" section in central admin does not offer a "reset to site definition" option.
• Checking "CustomizedPageStatus" property of the SPFile for my master page shows that it's set to "none", and indeed, calling RevertContentStream throws an exception. This indicates it may not necessarily be the unghosting issue.

Does anybody know where my images get deployed to , and what the cause of this problem may be? The "Deployment Location" property does not lead to the correct location (in fact, I can't even see my Feature's folder). Could it be something to do with the way variables in the path - {SharePointRoot}\\Template\\Features{FeatureName}\\StyleLibrary\\Branding101\\Images\\ - are parsed?

I am new to Sharepoint, so all and any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Since this is a Sandboxed solution, everything gets stored in the content database, accessible through SharePoint Designer 2010. In SP Designer, open the site you are working on, then look under "All Files" in Site Objects: that's where I found my masterpages, images, etc.

Deployment paths (displayed in module properties in VS2010) are just red herring, as no deployment to the file system itself takes place. Hope this helps somebody else!