.NET SharePoint development, what do I need ?

Question

Question: I'm an ASP.NET developer since about a bit more than a year now.

I'm thinking about changing the employer sometime in the future, and I've seen familiarity with SharePoint development as a requirement on many good job offerings.

Unfortunately I'm not (yet) familiar with SharePoint, so I wanted to know the following things:

1) What is it really good for/ Why is it needed ?
2) What do I need to start exercising SharePoint development, apart from Visual Studio Professional 2005/2008/2010 ? (SDK, server?, anything else)
3) URLs of any good sample applications online, where I can see the user perspective a bit ?
4) URLs to any good SharePoint sample application that includes source


Point two is what I'm most interested in.

Answer 1

1) What is it really good for/ Why is it needed ?

SharePoint is a product by Microsoft. It has a website with a lot of information. Ever thought about going there and reading it?

2) What do I need to start exercising SharePoint development, apart from Visual Studio Professional 2005/2008/2010 ? (SDK, server?, anything else

SharePoint Foundation 2010, Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7. SharePoint SDK. Developing for SharePoint 2007 is more painful as you can not install it on end user windows - makes development a hassle. That is for starters. For more you need a domain controller, a version of the server etc.

As SharePoint is a Microsoft product, MSDN has a section for it (guess what) ;) our starting point is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/default.aspx

3) URLs of any good sample applications online, where I can see the user perspective a bit ?

Same answer as 1. See, marketing likes to demonstrate how good things are ;)

Answer 2

Well I've got to say that your first job is to forget about the development side and just learn SharePoint (its a HUGE product).

Trying to learn both together is going to be hard, confusing and you will end up doing complex stuff in 100's of lines of c# that you can do in 4 clicks in the UI.

So with that in mind get SharePoint installed so you can play with it. Either SP2010 on Windows 7 or WSS on 2003/2008 server in a virtual machine - either VMWare/VirtualBox or even the pre-configured SharePoint 2010 demo VHD which comes with a whole load of example data, walkthroughs and documentation.

Then get busy on http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/ , Getting Started with SharePoint 2010 and google to find out how to really USE the product.

Only then, when you really understand SharePoint, should you start to look at cracking open Visual Studio and looking at it from a developers perceptive.

Answer 3

I answered a similar question some time ago that was more focused on Sharepoint 2007 development.

The main change I see to 2010 for development is that Sharepoint is now all 64 bit, which means that if you are running a virtual environment then the host needs to have Windows 2008 R2 installed with Hyper V to be able to run a Sharepoint 2010 development machine.

You also have much more support regarding the Sharepoint Designer which was totally useless in 2007 but looks promising for 2010. There are also more tools that come out of the box with Visual Studio 2010 to help you out, but you still need to go on the web and search for external tools to get you started.

The Object Model hasn't changed that much so my old answer still applies to some extent :)