Introduction to SharePoint 2010 Development
Here, you’ll learn everything you need to start developing on the new SharePoint 2010
platform.
In particular this tutorial we will explore in detail the primary development tool: Visual Studio
2010.
You’ll learn the strengths and weaknesses of SharePoint Designer 2010 and how it compares with
Visual Studio.
The topics covered in this article are
• SharePoint developer support
• Debugging your code
• Installation scenarios and how to set up your development environment
• Visual Studio 2010 and the SharePoint tools
• Developing on 64-bit computers
Not all developer tasks can be accomplished using visual tools. The SharePoint SDK (software
development kit—for SharePoint it’s a collection of help files, manuals, and examples) is a great
collection of tools, code examples, and documentation. This chapter will introduce the SDK and
highlight the most useful tools.
SharePoint projects tend to become large. Visual Studio Team System and the Team Foundation
Server are good bases for team development. We recommend, for optimal output from multiple
developers, that you establish a shared environment based on a SharePoint farm. You’ll learn how to set
up and use such an environment and how to incorporate desirable software development practices such
as continuous integration and rapid deployment.
Before You Start
This post assumes that you’re already familiar with SharePoint—at least SharePoint 2007—and its
underlying technologies and platform. However, it begins by clarifying some matters that might be
unclear even for an experienced developer.
First and foremost, SharePoint is an application platform. An application platform is a software
development foundation that consists of an operating system, one or more frameworks, and interfaces
that applications use to accomplish tasks. Primarily, an application platform has the user in mind.
Microsoft SharePoint is an example of a very good application platform.
The platform is a reliable, reusable, and well-documented set of products, technologies, and tools.
While some of these modules are highly usable out of the box, others may be replaced, customized, or
modified according to specific needs. The platform components are dedicated to specific services they
provide and that other components can consume.
An application provides business capabilities to its users via its components. A platform is classified
as having a service-oriented architecture (SOA) if the components provide a standard way to
communicate via services. The services use providers that act as a transparent layer between the
underlying data source and the service. SOA has evolved predominantly by using XML-based web
services. However, these services are not limited to XML, and modern platforms may support many
other data transmission standards. An application platform provides many ways to access the services,
and this is true for SharePoint. As a developer you not only consume such services, but also create
services, customize existing ones, and install providers appropriate to the business cases.
The production environment for the SharePoint application platform consists of the following:
• Windows Server as the common server platform.
For SharePoint 2010, Windows Server 2008 (64 bit) is the minimum requirement.
As parts of the operating system, you have to have access to the following:
