SharePoint scores with Web developers

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By David Worthington

September 15, 2008 — Microsoft has forecast that SharePoint will hit US$1 billion in revenue for 2008, and some analysts are predicting that it will steamroll the Web 2.0 market. SD Times interviewed several experts to discuss what is drawing enterprises to use SharePoint as a development platform and how it should evolve going forward.

SharePoint is a boon for Windows shops. The platform leverages the Microsoft stack that many have already paid to license, and they do not need to purchase additional software for development. It lets developers use their existing .NET programming skills to develop Web applications, and it provides timesaving pre-built components that would otherwise have to be built from scratch.

The platform’s growing popularity and the subtle differences between SharePoint and ASP.NET development are compelling Microsoft to invest in guidance to bring developers up to speed. The patterns and practices group at Microsoft has begun to write guidance for working with SharePoint APIs and building applications, according to Paul Andrew, senior technical product manager for SharePoint.

Microsoft ships the fundamental bits of SharePoint, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), as a free add-on for Windows Server. WSS leverages Internet Information Services and SQL Server as a data repository. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server runs on top of WSS and adds functionality, including integration with the Microsoft Office suite.

SharePoint provides a collaborative infrastructure for sharing information and assigning workflows through a secured portal. SharePoint pages are ASP.NET applications, and they embed ASP.NET server controls called Web parts.

SharePoint gives developers a lot of functionality for building Web applications out of the box that they would otherwise have to build themselves, said Ryan Thomas, SharePoint practice director at Syrinx Consulting.

Windows SharePoint Services has templates for links, announcements, contacts, events and tasks, and it issues lists (collections of information shared with SharePoint). Users may customize the templates or create their own.

At a lower level, SharePoint has facilities for data access and list management built in; developers do not have to change database schema or write store procedures for SQL Server, Thomas said. Additionally, its CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language) makes it possible to run data queries without “cracking open Visual Studio,” resulting in significant time savings, he said.

“Developers get the speed of pre-built plumbing,” Thomas said. “Microsoft has run QA over it, and the CRUD [create, read, update and delete] operations are built into the quality life cycle. There are standard data access operations against SharePoint lists; you don’t have to spend nearly as much time testing.”

Another timesaving feature is that SharePoint permits business users to control the layout of pages, whereas with an ASP.NET Web site, developers have to write customizations for that to happen, said Lou Franco, a SharePoint engineer at document imaging component maker Atalasoft.

Franco noted that SharePoint development is slightly more difficult than standard ASP.NET development because Web parts are hand-coded in the absence of a GUI designer from Microsoft within Visual Studio.

Developers write applications fundamentally the same way they would write ASP.NET applications. That is “almost a slam dunk for efficiency,” leveraging existing .NET development skill sets, Thomas said.

With those skills, developers can extend what comes out of the box. SharePoint offers a consistent menu structure, UI navigation and user interface for developers to extend rather than build those elements themselves, said Microsoft’s Andrew.

Applications use SharePoint’s existing memory pool and security settings. Building applications within one program eliminates the likelihood that a single application would go down because it got out of date with the IT infrastructure, Andrew said.

In a January report, Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young predicted that Microsoft SharePoint would “steamroll” the Web 2.0 market and that IT departments taking a leadership role in enterprise 2.0 deployments would look at SharePoint first.

Caught off guard
As developers catch on to SharePoint, Microsoft is catching up with developers.

Microsoft's Andrew said the company had not anticipated SharePoint’s popularity in the development community. “When [SharePoint] first came out, things were not scaled for its growth,” he admitted. “If Microsoft is good at anything, [however,] it is coming back to try again, work harder and harder.”

The company will continue to add support and development resources to SharePoint to handle the increased growth, he said.

But SharePoint may have grown up too fast. “SharePoint has bloat,” said Syrinx’s Thomas. “It is a large application with a lot of moving parts, and is not written as efficiently has Microsoft could have [written it] under the covers.” As an example, he cited SharePoint’s inclination to load unnecessary image and JavaScript files.

While a developer might build a small application in a simpler way, SharePoint is a large application with more functionality, Andrew observed. “There is a balance between elegance and end-user functionality.”

That very functionality, however, may permit developers to write sloppy code for Web parts, such as calling a database twice to find an item in a SharePoint list, Thomas cautioned. “.NET makes it easy for a programmer to get sloppy because everything is so readily available for you.”

Atalasoft’s Franco noted that it’s possible to write bad code in any system. “It is the responsibility of the developer to understand how to manipulate SharePoint lists and [to realize that] that many objects they build [in SharePoint] are not disposable. They cannot rely on .NET’s garbage collector,” which SharePoint uses.

The patterns and practices group at Microsoft will start publishing prescriptive guidance in the coming months for working with SharePoint APIs and building applications, said Andrew, adding that it has already published best practices for tuning memory management in SharePoint. Additionally, the group is working to establish guidance for life cycle management with SharePoint, he said.

Microsoft’s developer division will also invest in tools and improve SharePoint Extensions for Visual Studio.

The next version of Visual Studio will bundle tools for SharePoint, and Microsoft intends to migrate SharePoint developers onto it, Andrew added. He would not specify what the new tools might be. Microsoft will continue to develop SharePoint extensions for Visual Studio

Microsoft will announce its road map for SharePoint developer tools around its Professional Developers Conference at the end of October, according to Andrew.

Related Search Term(s): NET, SharePoint, Windows, Microsoft

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