Best practices for SharePoint 2007 devlopment

Question

Hi want to know best practices for creation of features. normally Visual studio extension creates feature for each web part is it good practice or we should create 1 feature for multiple web parts in one WSP

Answer 1

I don't know of any best-practice, but I can see two ways (I can think of) of looking at it:

When you separate your webparts into several features, you have the possibility to activate/deactivate the different webparts at will. If one webpart has an error you can just deactivate it. When one webpart fails compiling, you still have the others running smoothly.
The downside is that you "clutter" the Sharepoint Interface, because you have to manage several Features instead of one. That goes for activating/deactivating as well as deploying/retracting.

If you have one feature it is all of the above, just in reverse. You only have one feature to activate/deactivate, which makes it faster to manager. But if that one feature fails in some way (or any of the webparts within) you can only deactivate the whole thing. The same goes for deployment/retracting. When one webpart within your feature fails you have to retract the whole thing.

Whether development is easier or harder depends on your preference. One might say that it is harder to keep a consistent configuration in one huge feature deploying a multitude of webparts, workflows and master pages (where was the entry for that workflow again? ah yes, in line 1112) - on the other hand you have everything in one place and don't have to search in several features.

I would really make it up to your personal preference. When you are deploying a Solution to a customer, the customer is certainly more happy to click/install/deploy the "MyCompany Super Solution Feature" instead of several smaller ones, in the end you don't install MS Word with several setup.exe's (and then again, you can choose what features of Word to install...)