Professional SharePoint 2013 Development

Chapter 3

Developer Tools for SharePoint 2013

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding the different tools available to SharePoint developers
• Exploring what’s new in SharePoint Designer 2013
• Using the new SharePoint tools in Visual Studio

SharePoint has become one of the most developed-on platforms over the last decade, and Microsoft has invested in the developer experience with every release of SharePoint. SharePoint 2013 continues to improve the tools available for developers such as Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer while making tremendous strides with the addition of apps, Office 365, and Microsoft Office development. The addition of apps in SharePoint 2013 is a drastic change along with using familiar programming web standards such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, OData, REST, and OAuth. The developer tools have included this support as well with full support for development against the cloud platforms. If you have used SharePoint 2010, you will see that many of the same project files are available, but there are new additions to the array of items you can now use.

The development tools are more integrated with the platform; debugging is easier in complex scenarios such as the web and more; and new tooling containing designers and templates was added so that you can easily work on SharePoint and transition to another web-based framework. This chapter takes a deeper look at each of these tools so that you can understand what they can do for development with SharePoint.

CUSTOMIZATION ...