Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

THE NEW APP MODEL FOR OFFICE

The new app model for Office 2013 works in a similar manner as the new app model for SharePoint 2013 to mitigate many of the challenges developers have faced in the past. The result has become a better platform for developers to include a broader set of technologies in their solutions while not having the risk of impacting the core runtime environments of SharePoint and the Office clients. In Chapter 2, “Overview of the SharePoint 2013 App Model,” you learned how the new app model for SharePoint 2013 helps to improve some problem areas that SharePoint 2010 had around full-trust deployments that could impact server and end-user performance if code misbehaved. It also allows developers to move beyond the restrictions imposed by sandboxed solutions. In the same way, the new app model for Office 2013 addresses a number of challenges developers and IT have faced historically in Office with add-in installations, but it also is forward-looking in its adoption of web-based standards such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and so on, which can now better facilitate web developers in surfacing valued cloud-based assets inside of Office.

The new app model for Office can be considered an evolutionary and logical step in the programmability/extensibility model for the Office clients. As the desktop, laptop, and other device form factors have evolved, so have the underlying hardware architectures. For instance, Office now runs on Windows RT which utilizes the ARM architecture ...