How to become sharepoint developer from ASP.NET/Silverlight developer?

Question

Hello friends, I heard from my peers that knowledge of sharepoint is going to be good for career. We do not use sharepoint at our office. So dont know how to get started. These are my sharepoint newbie questions

1. Is learning sharepoint worth the effort?
2. Where are the resources to learn sharepoint?
3. Is there any reference project I should considering aiming to develop?

Appreciate your inputs.

Answer 1

1. A lot of companies I have worked for in the recent past have used SharePoint and need customizations for it so I would say yes. Also, apps which run in SharePoint and as a standalone are very handy (and some would say trendy) at the moment.

2. When customizing SharePoint you should look to building web parts which consume it's API. This is no different than any other ASP.Net web part, save for the API. When I need info I usually look to Scott Guthrie (The Gu) at Microsoft for information. And he did not disappoint this time, here is a blog post with some great articles and links. Scott Gu on SharePoint Web Parts

3. If you have MSDN (or Tech Net) I believe they have a developer addition of SharePoint. I would load it up and just start playing around. See what the interface looks like and how to make customizations without code changes and then move on to making some custom web parts. Have fun!

Answer 2

SharePoint is embraced by a ton of large companies, and is pretty powerful out of the box -- but as corporations become more dependent on it for day to day business processes, they definitely need customizations. I would say it is absolutely something that is worth learning from a career standpoint. As of a few years ago, a friend at a Chicago-based consulting company told me that SharePoint was their largest growing practice.

For development, for SharePoint 2007 or earlier you need to have access to a full instance of SharePoint server -- which only runs on Microsoft Server OSs (Windows Server 2003 or 2008) most developers set up a virtual machine with Windows Server and SharePoint, then install Visual Studio on it.

With Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010, the developer story is changing a lot; you can develop and debug web parts on Windows 7, and the Web Part model is much more Silverlight-based. The down side is that corporate adoption of SharePoint 2010 will take some time. You may consider waiting on learning SharePoint 2007 and see if your time would be better spent ramping up on 2010 and using more of your current knowledge.

Answer 3

SharePoint has transformed my career in a such a positive way, I have become a huge advocate/evangelist and have a lot of passion for this technology.

I will say my career/role shift from technical business analyst into systems integration and application development can be almost directly attributed to learning SharePoint.

Quick background - Had previous IT infrastructure experience before I went back to university to get my bachelor's degree. Studied business and MIS, eventually was recruited to work for a company to basically do financial analyst stuff. The company implemented SharePoint version 2.0 soon after I got there. Having some minor exposure to the product previous to my employment, I was put on the project team for the initial roll out. I implemented the first SharePoint portal for that company (and it was a crappy one let me tell you) and I was hooked even with all the failings of SharePoint v2!

Fast forward a few years, now I'm a full time developer, integrating legacy business processes and applications into the SharePoint environment. FAR more interesting than writing pro forma budgets or forecasting maintenance costs...

So I will say this - SharePoint is completely worthwhile to learn.

On Training: There are a ton of training materials available for WSS/MOSS, from end user all the way to architect level.

For an experienced devloper I think the most valuable training you can attend is an administrator's boot camp. Getting such a deep dive into the guts of SharePoint is super valuable, from these aspects:

1. Server side debugging and troubleshooting efforts on SharePoint apps.
2. From a solutions engineering perspective: Understanding what can and can't be done in SharePoint and most importantly - why
3. Having a deep understanding of the OOTB features of SharePoint so you can leverage that functionality instead of recreating the wheel constantly

I hope this helps answer some questions. Good luck!