Debugging Feature Receivers

A great technique when developing a sharepoint feature receiver:

Create yourself an announcements list and have the feature log the install (or failure to do so) to this location.

 This is much less messy than debugging on a production box.

 This announcement list can be locked down so only developers and admin’s can read it.

 I have found that you can create and populate a custom list and a view in 20 lines of code (genericly).

 This contrasts to 4000 lines of xml per list/view.