I do a lot of SharePoint development. I always package up my code for deployment into a SharePoint solution file (a WSP file). Every now and again, when I try to add the solution to the SharePoint farm using the command:

stsadm.exe -o addsolution –filename [solution_file_name.wsp]

I get the error:

“[solution_file_name.wsp]: The file manifest.xml does not exist in the solution package.”

To make a long story short, this is often caused by a default setting in the makecab.exe utility that I use to create the WSP file. Just a bit of trivia for the young kids here, makecab.exe is a very, very old tool. It was used way back when for packing software for distribution onto floppy disks. You know, the things that were about 100 times larger than an SD card and held only 1.44 MB of data. That is in fact where the default settings on makecab.exe actually come from: the default file size for the generated CAB files (WSPs are CAB files) were designed to fit onto those old 3.5 inch floppy disks.

But, the makecab.exe utility is extremely flexible and customizable. Check out the Microsoft Cabinet SDK for more details. Here are the relevant directives to set in the DDF file in order to get rid of that out-dated file size limit:

• .Set CabinetFileCountThreshold=0
• .Set FolderFileCountThreshold=0
• .Set FolderSizeThreshold=0
• .Set MaxCabinetSize=0
• .Set MaxDiskFileCount=0
• .Set MaxDiskSize=0