Required Sharepoint Development Tools

Question

I am a java person, having to learn how to develop a website/portal application on Sharepoint. What tool(s) do I need, and, what option(s) of Sharepoint do I need to build a portal, that uses Sharpoint as a content management system.

I'm assuming Visual Studio is one of the tool(s)?

Answer 1

I find SPLint+ useful. See UltimateSharepoint.com

Answer 2

I found this post helpful... Getting Started as a Sharepoint Developer

Answer 3

Well, Sharepoint Designer is handy for customising sites. Although its orientated towards the sharepoint user community, there are some features it has, which make it a better choice for portal development. Its really handy for building site structure with the featured webparts and then perhaps using VS2k8 for workflow and web parts development.

Also avoid vs2k5 if that is all you have, as you need plugins to make it work with Sharepoint 2k7.

Sharepoint Designer

Answer 4

Visual Studio 2008 with VSeWSS 3.0 extensions for developing against 2007 version. Also, SharePoint Designer 2007. It's all going to be 64-bit if you are going to be developing against 2010. However, DO NOT even open SharePoint Designer until you know the difference between customized and uncustomized pages and how you need to use Features to deploy your customizations:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc406685.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd348394.aspx

Answer 5

Here's what I use in my dev VM

Windows Server 2008 Standard

• SQL Server 2005 Standard
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
• 2007 Enterprise
• Visual Studio 2008 for web part, event handler and workflow development (Don't use 2005 unless you absolutely have to)
• Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint 1.3 (1.2 for Visual Studio 2005)
• SharePoint Designer 2007 (Basic UI & Branding, Simple Non-Portable Workflows)
• InfoPath 2007

Answer 6

The only two tools I am using is SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio. I heard my colleagues are talking about Windows PowerShell which they noticed after participating Tech•Ed 2009. However I am still green on this.

Answer 7

Sharepoint Designer - Prototyping, code-free solutions, content-types, page layouts, Masterpage design. Note that everything you do here is not easily repeatable / redeployable. Plus you can end up making changes in a live environment so consider whether or not this is appropriate. A very useful tool when in development.

Visual Studio - Compiled solutions (web parts, features, event handlers) WSPBuilder & SPVisualDev - From codeplex (i.e. free) & help you package sharepoint solutions. Great for getting started as do a lot of the grunt work for you (so you can learn how to build packages properly). You can also use SPVisualDev to develop on a remote machine (i.e. not on the server).

Sharepoint Manager - lets you navigate through your sharepoint farm and see what's underneath the covers.

U2U CAML Query tool - helps you build caml queries

SPSource - Reverse engineer Sharepoint artifacts (i.e. create a list in the browser, point SPSource at the list, and it will generate the files you need).