'The 14 hive'

SharePoint developers talk a lot about the so called '14 hive'. It's a collection of folders and subfolders on the SharePoint web servers and holds all the local SharePoint files that we installed there during the installation. It can also hold several custom files that were deployed over time. It's very important to know what you can find here as it will help you during the development of your custom stuff and could also give you deeper insight during development problems.

TIP: create a shortcut to the 14 hive on your desktop. It's a real pain to always have to browse to the location manually.

The SharePoint 14 hive is located here: Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14. When developing, a lot of articles will in some way refer to this hive or files that live in it. Always remember to never touch out of the box SharePoint files because you will end up with an unsupported version.

Here are some of the more important subfolders and there function:

- ISAPI: contains almost all out of the box SOAP and WCF Web Services
- TEMPLATE/CONTROLTEMPLATES: holds the out of the box user controls

- TEMPLATE/FEATURES: holds all feature definitions

While you are using SharePoint and visiting different pages, you might have noticed URL's that contain '_layouts' or '_vti_bin'. These are virtual directories mapped to folders in this 14 hive. If you want a complete overview of all the virtual directories, open IIS manager (start->run->inetmgr), open a SharePoint web site and take a look at the folder structure. You will notice for example that '_layouts' is mapped to the TEMPLATE/LAYOUTS subfolder and '_vti_bin' to the ISAPI subfolder.