STSDev wsp (cab) file size

Recently a co-worker and I were using Ted Pattison's excellent STSDEV utility to package up some images in a feature that we were creating for a MOSS Publishing Portal.

We ran into a problem while compiling the feature once we had added all of images.

STSDEV kept giving us an error like the following:

Feature Name.wsp: The file manifest.xml does not exist in the solution package.

We noticed that it was actually creating the WSP file in the Deployment Files directory, but we didn't understand why it was so small. Now a WSP file is really just a CAB file so we did some searching and found that the default size of a CAB file made with makecab.exe is 1.44 mb, which was about the size of our CAB file. So the cab file that STSDEV creates is too small to contain all of the images and that's what was causing our error.

The source is available for STSDEV here. We thought we would try and modify STSDEV to see if we could increase the WSP file size. We found that by modifying the file CabDdfBuilder.cs in the STSDev\Core\Builders\DeploymentFiles folder and adding this line

writer.WriteLine(".Set MaxDiskSize=CDROM"); between these lines:

writer.WriteLine(".Set Cabinet=on");

writer.WriteLine(".Set DiskDirectory1=" + Globals.DeploymentFilesFolder);

We could make the WSP file size about the size of a CdRom which would be about 700 mb. Hopefully we won't ever have any features that really get that big but this allowed us to solve our problem of packaging up the image files.

Hope this helps other STSDEV users.