How to Create SharePoint Development environment

With the increasing popularity and a rapid rate of adoption of Microsoft

SharePoint in the software industry as well as in the other industries, there has

been a significant increase in the number of SharePoint development projects

over the past few years that target SharePoint environments.

As more and

more companies and organizations begin to use SharePoint applications, there is

an influx of professional developers who are migrating to Microsoft SharePoint

from the other development platforms.

To create a SharePoint development environment, a guidance documentation is

designed which contains detailed examples, and a reusable class library. Solution

developers and architects follow the guidance document for making the right

decisions and continue with the right practices when designing and developing

SharePoint applications.

This guidance document contains key areas which are important to understand

for a SharePoint developer or architect while developing SharePoint applications.

Guidance Documentation

Designing and developing rich, robust SharePoint applications can be challenging

sometimes. The guidance documentation which helps in developing SharePoint

applications is divided into four core sections:

Application Foundations for SharePoint 2010- This section describes the

approaches to meet the challenges of testability, flexibility, configuration,

logging and exception handling, and maintainability.

Execution Models in SharePoint 2010- provides technical insights into the

mechanics of the full-trust execution environment, the sandbox execution

environment, and various hybrid approaches to executing code in

SharePoint applications.

Data Models in SharePoint 2010- explains external data functionality, key

design decision points that can help the developers to choose between

standard SharePoint lists and external lists.

Client Application Models in SharePoint 2010- This section provides

guidance on how to use the new client-side functionality with Silverlight

and Ajax to access data and build richer client experiences.

The key observation in SharePoint project management is that the developers do

not have to create SharePoint applications as Microsoft SharePoint Foundation

2010 already provides the applications that developers target in their SharePoint

development efforts. Instead, they extend applications and websites that are

created by the underlying platform.

SharePoint Development Platform helps to Create Specialized Services

The SharePoint development platform also provides several other developer

opportunities to create specialized components and services, which are as

follows:

Timer jobs

Custom Windows PowerShell snap-ins

Custom navigation providers

Custom claim providers

.NET assembly connectors

Sandboxed solution validators

Trusted proxies for sandboxed solutions

Excel Services user-defined functions

Custom web services

Service applications

Conclusion

SharePoint platform has been associated with intranet, content management and

document management but recent versions have significantly broader

capabilities. It is the dominant software for creating organizational intranets with

a recent survey indicating that around 50% of all intranets are developed using

SharePoint.

SharePoint is gaining recognition as a full-fledged application server with many

features and enhancements that specifically allow non-developers to create

sophisticated intranet sites. However, with the 2010 release, Microsoft’s

SharePoint increasingly becomes a compelling development platform.