Programming Microsoft's Clouds: Windows Azure™ and Office 365

Chapter 2

Getting Your Environment Ready for Office 365

What’s in This Chapter?

• Learning how to set up an Office 365 environment
• Exploring various approaches available to build an Office 365 development environment
• Learning how to set up a development environment for Office 365
• Developing your first application for SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Understanding Office 365 development challenges and exploring development resources

This chapter helps you set up a development environment for Office 365. At the time of this writing, Microsoft does not provide Office 365 SDK as a single download. This means that you must do a bit more work to get everything set up and running before you kick-start the development. Separate sections cover SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online. Later in the chapter you learn about common challenges associated with Office 365 development and various resources that Microsoft makes available for Office 365 developers.

Your Office 365 Cloud Environment

Before you start setting up your development environment, the first thing to do is to register for Office 365. For testing purposes you can create a trial account with Office 365, which is available free of charge for 30 days. If your business already has an existing Office 365 account, you can use this existing account. However its highly recommended that you set up a new account with Office 365 because Microsoft does not provide separate ...