Professional Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 25

SharePoint

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Setting up a development environment for SharePoint
• Developing custom SharePoint components such as Web Parts, lists, and workflows
• Debugging and testing SharePoint projects
• Packaging and deploying SharePoint components

Over the past couple of years the level of interest — and number of deployments — in Microsoft SharePoint has reached the point where SharePoint is now one of Microsoft’s fastest growing product lines. Sure, it seems that SharePoint has been around for a while. And it has been, in various forms. However, a lot of effort has gone into improving the development story for SharePoint. Although it is not “perfect,” writing SharePoint components using Visual Studio has gone from painful and cumbersome (needing to run Visual Studio on Windows Server, needing to run as an administrator) to not bad (you still have to run it as an administrator, but debugging is easy, and you can develop most components in 64-bit Windows 7). This chapter discusses some of the great features that you can expect.

SharePoint is a collection of related products and technologies that broadly service the areas of document and content management, web-based collaboration, and search. SharePoint is also a flexible application hosting platform, which enables you to develop and deploy everything from individual Web Parts to full-blown web applications.

Although you can use it to host websites for anonymous external visitors, SharePoint is more ideally ...