SandBox vs Farm solution

SandBox vs Farm solution

Sandboxed solutions run in a secure, monitored process. Sandboxed solutions can be deployed without requiring SharePoint administrative privileges. If you choose a sandboxed solution, you can only use project item types that are valid in sandboxed solutions.

Sandboxed solutions are deployed at the site collection level rather than the farm level, so this lets you isolate a solution so it is only available to one site collection within the farm. Sandboxed solutions also run in a separate process from the main SharePoint IIS web application process, and the separate process is throttled and monitored with quotas to protect the SharePoint site from becoming unresponsive due to a misbehaving sandboxed solution. With sandboxed solutions, users

can upload solutions without requiring administrator approval.

If you choose the option “Deploy as a farm solution,” Visual Studio will deploy the solution as a fully trusted farm solution. If you choose a farm solution, you can use all available SharePoint project item types in your project, but deployment will require administrative privileges and the solution will run in full trust.

So in the end, the choice between sandboxed and farm solutions should come down to whether or not you need to create an application page or a workflow with code in it. For these kinds of solutions, you should pick a farm solution. For all other solutions, pick a sandboxed solution. The only  other reason to use a farm solution over a sandboxed solution is if you really have some code that needs to run at the web application or farm level, perhaps because it needs to interact with or move data between multiple site collections. In this case, you would create a farm solution as well.