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SharePoint Development: It's All in the Ingredients


By David Rubinstein
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September 15, 2009 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Microsoft’s SharePoint Server is many things to many people. It’s an office collaboration platform. It’s a portal into corporate data. It’s a content management system. And for software developers, it’s a new application infrastructure.

SharePoint comes with most of the components needed to create line-of-business applications, including Web parts, lists, workflows and more. So the question for organizations is: When do you bring in developers? Are they merely customizing these features, adding some small piece of functionality, or doing full-blown application development with SharePoint as the underlying infrastructure?

The answer, of course, lies in the needs of the organization, as well as with the expertise of the IT staff.

“Because SharePoint offers so many options, there’s a lot you can do before you even start with developers,” said Chris Keyser, Microsoft program manager for patterns and practices for SharePoint guidance. Keyser said a lot of Microsoft customers are still just getting a feel for SharePoint and are only working around its edges.

“Building Web parts, changing a workflow…these are things you can do with a limited understanding of the platform. Getting into custom lists, event and feature receivers, things like that, the more you need to know,” he said.

While SharePoint might be foreign to the information workers who are learning to assemble business applications from these out-of-the-box and custom components, the architecture should be immediately recognizable to Microsoft developers.

“If you’re coming in from .NET, concepts like master pages and Web parts are familiar,” Keyser said. “You can get moving quickly. At some point, depending upon how far you want to go, there are some good resources out there.”

He pointed to MSDN as an onramp for .NET developers moving to SharePoint. “You should understand how features work in SharePoint, how solution packages work in SharePoint…”

After the decision is reached to customize SharePoint or build out entirely new applications, putting in place a good set of practices is critical, as it would be for any new development work, Keyser said.



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