Developing and deploying onto a multi-server farm in SharePoint 2010

Our main SharePoint 2010 farm consists of four servers and one database server.  We originally set up a disaster-recovery environment that was built in the same way, but this has since become our development/testing environment.  One of the servers has Visual Studio 2013 installed, and this is where I do all of my SharePoint 2010 development.

Almost everyone recommends developing on a single-server development farm, and one of the reasons is because Visual Studio can't confidently deploy the development onto the SharePoint site/site collection/web application.  It will often spring up an error:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Activate Features': Feature with Id 'f8214413-dcb6-428e-9252-032ca228ba03' is not installed in this farm, and cannot be added to this scope.

This is basically occurring because, well, I'm not sure.  I know it doesn't happen on a single-server development environment (or at least, not for the same reason).  But I didn't have a choice; I have to develop on this multi-server farm.

So, my solution.  Since I'm able to use PowerShell successfully to update the SPSolution, I figured I'd just take the wsp file created after building in Visual Studio, and run Update-SPSolution instead.  However, the wsp file is not always updated after Building a solution, only when Deploying.  And since Deploying fails (and often happens to retract the solution and delete web parts), I needed to figure out a way of creating the wsp file without attempting an actual deploy.

What I did was:

1. Right-click on the project in Visual Studio, and select Properties.
2. On the left-hand side, select SharePoint to bring up the deployment options.
3. Click "New..." to create a new Deployment Configuration.
4. Call it whatever you want, and simply add "Run Pre-Deployment Command" and "Run Post-Deployment Command" into the right-hand box labelled "Selected Deployment Steps".
5. Click OK, and then change the Active Deployment Configuration to the one you just created.

Now, when you right-click your project and select Deploy, it will create a wsp file and then stop.  You can then run the following command to update your existing SPSolution:

Update-SPSolution -Identity projectname.wsp -LiteralPath "C:\Path To Visual Studio 2013\Projects\SolutionName\ProjectName\bin\Debug\projectname.wsp" -GACDeployment 

You can get the LiteralPath from the output in Visual Studio:

Successfully created package at: C:\Path To Visual Studio 2013\Projects\SolutionName\ProjectName\bin\Debug\projectname.wsp

Sure, you can't Debug in this way, but at least you can continue with your development on a multi-server farm.

Sandboxed code sometimes failing with "Sandboxed code execution request failed"

Nice and short one here (which unfortunately took me a long time to pin down).  I have a simple webpart running in a sandboxed solution.  The webpart has a label and a button, and there is no other code-behind.

Sometimes, when rendering the web part, I get the error:

[SPUserCodeExecutionPipelineFailedException: Sandboxed code execution request failed.]

It's not a nice error but it only appears sometimes.  I'm running on a four-server farm so I assumed it was something to do with the sandboxed code service not running on one of the servers.  However, the service was running on all of them.

It's probably not solved anything (but it's a development environment so I'm not too bothered), but I found a workaround:

1. Go to Central Administration
2. Click on System Settings, and then Manage user solutions
3. In this screen, select "All sandboxed code runs on the same machine as a request".
4. Click OK.

The webpart now works reliably.  I'm assuming one of my servers isn't happy with the sandbox service credentials but I can move on with my life for now.