SharePoint End to End Development

Question

How do you use SharePoint as an end-to-end developer platform?

1. Which Source control software do you use typically. SourceSafe/TFS or any other source control software?
2. Which end to end development tools/methodologies do you use?
3. When do you allow SPD as development platform, and how do you maintain the site working with SPD?
4. What the best practices for coding that you follow?
5. How do you handle adding new web services?

Regards, Rahul

Answer 1

1. We use TFS because we have a group in our company that supports the TFS Server. If this group did not exist I do not believe we would use this tool.

2. Visual Studio 2008 / Aspects of Extreme Programming and Agile.

3. Never, we view SharePoint Designer as evil. We do everything through custom developed programs or scripts.

4. Consistency, Consistency, Consistency... we have some common sense practices that have come from many places (Software Craftmanship Movement, MS Patterns and Practices and experiance).

5. We have managed to avoid integrating Web Services into our SharePoint solution.

Answer 2

In our organization, we use the following:

1. Subversion, with AnkhSvn

2. VS 2008 is our IDE (SPD for Development is bad) and Scrum/Agile. For builds/deployments we use WSPBuilder and SharePoint Installer

3. Be careful with SPD. In our organization, we restrict who is even allowed to download and install it.

4. Use SPDisposeCheck to double check your code to avoid disposing of objects when not needed, or to double check that you did dispose of what needs to be disposed of.

5. We have configured a separate IIS website on the the SharePoint WFEs to host custom web services that use the object model. Those that don't use the object model are hosted elsewhere.