A few years ago I wrote an article explaining how to manually modify a SharePoint WSP solution using a specific software, over the years I got feedback about adware being added to the computers during the installation process of the software.
I recently tried to install this particular software and my antivirus automatically pop up saying that the file was not safe, to get rid of all this issues I decided to build a specific application to repackage all the files inside of the WSP solution.
The WSP Repackage is really easy to use, just need to select the folder where all the WSP files are located, select the output directory and provide the name to the WSP file in a matter of seconds the compressed WSP solution will be ready.
In the first version the WSP Repackage only compress the files, if you want to add or remove files to the solution make sure that you reference them in the XML files otherwise they might be ignored when you deploy the solution or cause an error.
A tool like this is useful in scenarios where you need to edit a solution or webpart and you don’t have access to the Visual Studio project.
The source code is available on github and codeplex and you are welcomed to contribute with new ideas and with new versions of this tool.
I have plans to make it more efficient, in the next version I’ll implement a validation that will check if all the files are referenced in the xml files and also if all the referenced files still exist in the solution.
Let me know if this is something that might be useful for you and if it is what features would you like to see implemented.
