Two good tools to keep in your toolkit

Most of the time, I get to work in projects already in a Production environment.

Sometimes, the objective of the project is to resolve performance issues or migrated content / functionalities. 

Not often, but it happens, the source code and the SharePoint solutions are not available to you. 

In those hard times, i usually use this two tools:

SharePoint Farm Solution Extractor 

(see it here)

SharePoint Farm Solution Extractor is a great and simple tool that helps you extract the .wsp files in an SharePoint 2007 Farm.

ILSpy

(link here)

A free alternative to the now paid .NET Reflector. It's a very nice .NET assembly browser and decompiler.

If you know any alternatives to this tools or have some tools you use, give me some feedback :)

Custom Site Template in Variations

You have created a custom Site Template and you need to use it in your Variations?

Very simple.

Open your webtemp.xml file.

In the configuration node of your Template, you just need to add the following property:

FilterCategories="PublishingSiteTemplate"

Here's an example of my webtempMySiteTemplate.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Templates xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint">

<Configuration ID="0"

Title="My Site Template"

Hidden="FALSE"

ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/CPVW.gif"

Description="My Custom Site Template Description"

DisplayCategory="MyCustomTemplates"

SubWebOnly="TRUE"

FilterCategories="PublishingSiteTemplate">

</Configuration>

</Template>

</Templates>

Now, after deploying your .wsp, check Variation Labels under Site Settings.

Your site template should now appear under the Publishing Site Template dropdown list:

(this print screen is in Portuguese :) )

Good luck ;)