What are the supportable options for delivering ASP.Net 3.5 capability to SharePoint 2007?

Question

I want to make use of some of the ASP.NET 3.5 capability within SharePoint 2007. In particular, I want to do the following:

• Provide REST and maybe JSON through HTTP so that another product can consume SharePoint content.
• Provide AJAX web parts within SharePoint. These will probably have little to no server side controls. Most content will be loaded using Javascript and hitting an external system (primarily not SharePoint) over HTTP that provides REST or JSON.
• Provide this capability as a product. This is not a one-off solution for a single implementation.

My main concern is push-back from IT groups not wanting to change their SharePoint environment to allow for the product to work. So, I'd prefer to be able to say that what I'm doing is "supported by Microsoft", but I'm not sure that will be the case.

I realize that I could create a separate (non-SharePoint) web site on the SharePoint server(s) for WCF endpoints that provide SharePoint data to an external application. I would rather not do this because that won't help my web parts (if they need help) and that makes deployment harder. Proper SharePoint deployment will automatically have SharePoint update all necessary files (e.g., web.config) on any new web front end added to the farm and this wouldn't follow that pattern. In addition, I'd lose the ability to use SPContext.Current.

I have read much of Daniel Larson's book on Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft Platform (good read, BTW), esp. Chapter 11 on extending SharePoint. He outlines WCF, ASMX, and HTTP Handler options and for the most part recommends the HTTP Handler option. It appears that the HTTP Handler option has minimal changes to web.config.

I have also seen a blogs on SharePoint as a WCF Host, SharePoint 2007 and the Thin .NET 3.5 Development Model, How to: Get up and running with .NET 3.5 in your SharePoint environment, and Enabling .NET 3.5 in SharePoint 2007 Sites, the Lazy Way. As well as the "Silverlight (.NET 3.5) Config Feature" (and maybe even the "Ajax.Config Feature") in the SharePoint 2007 Features CodePlex Project. It seems that all of these options do some fairly drastic changes to the web.config and may not be acceptable to potential customers.

What are the opinions out there on this? What about if I want to use the AJAX Control Toolkit (I've used this before in SharePoint, but it has been a while)?

Note that we probably could require SharePoint SP2 if that helps, but I don't think it does.

Note also that Silverlight is not a requirement for the SharePoint web parts, but allowing for it might be nice.

Answer 1

Your first point could be solved by a custom wrapper to the SharePoint web services, presenting the API that you want to present, rather than the generic web service.

Your second point, AJAX enabled pages and web parts, is already possible - how to enable AJAX in SharePoint.

Answer 2

.NET 3.5 Is supported in SharePoint (as of SP1 I believe), However you will not be able to get away from making web.config changes and installing .NET 3.5 on the servers - it will likely only be there if there are already AJAX web parts in use.

Aside from that what you are looking at is largely independent of SharePoint - If you can build something as an aspx page or asmx web service you should be able to deploy it to a SharePoint site.

If you want to avoid 3.5 installation issues altogether you should be able to build something totally separate - jQuery for the web parts (no server side components needed) and for getting data out of sharepoint build something that translates calls to the standard web services into a friendlier interface.