What Is SharePoint Development

In this blog I’ll try to describe about SharePoint development. It is necessary to know about the Development, how to work with.

What Is SharePoint Development?

Development in SharePoint is an interesting hybrid of several Microsoft 

Technologies and styles of development. For example, when you build a

Custom web part or custom application page in SharePoint, it will feel very

Similar to creating a web part or web page with ASP.NET. This may make

You think that SharePoint development is just like ASP.NET development.

But just when you are feeling confident, you hit the barrier of packaging

and deployment. To deploy that web part or web page, you will have to

use SharePoint’s packaging and deployment system, which is a system

that uses custom XML files to define what SharePoint calls “features.”

Those features are packaged with their associated files into a .WSP file

(basically a CAB file renamed to .WSP). Finally, you must run a command

line tool on the SharePoint server to process the WSP file and install the

web part or web page.

If you want to customize the behavior of a SharePoint list, development

in SharePoint begins to feel more like the customization of a rich client

application such as Office. You create a .NET assembly that handles a set of

events raised by a particular SharePoint list. You interact with SharePoint’s

object model much like Office customizations interact with the Office object

model. Then you use SharePoint’s packaging and deployment system to

install your .NET assembly.

If you want to create a custom SharePoint list, a custom content type, or

a site definition, development in SharePoint begins to feel like declarative

programming. SharePoint has a custom XML language called CAML,

which is used to define key objects such as lists, columns, and content types.

This XML language can be difficult to learn and manipulate to get the

results you want. In this book, we will typically recommend using Share-

Point Designer as the “WYSIWYG” editor for editing the XML that defines

these custom SharePoint types. As before, you then use SharePoint’s packaging

and deployment system to install your custom SharePoint types.

If you want to develop custom workflows in SharePoint, another

Microsoft technology must be learned—the Windows Workflow Foundation.

SharePoint’s workflow features are often used to automate workflow

that people participate in for items in a list or even workflow that occurs at

a site level. If you have worked with workflow, this will feel familiar to

you—it is yet another style of development used within SharePoint. Typically

your workflow also interacts with the SharePoint object model to get

interesting things to happen.

SharePoint can feel like ASP.NET at times, like event-driven customizations

at other times, like declarative programming, like workflow programming,

and like code focused on automating an object model at other

times. This can make SharePoint programming difficult—you have to get

comfortable with many styles of programming to get interesting things

done.