The SharePoint Community
However, keep in mind that SharePoint is not just a huge piece of software. It is also part of an ecosystem
of communities, information sources, consultant companies, third-party developers, forums, and books
that provide support, help, training, and ideas. You can find people to communicate with, and meet to
exchange ideas or discuss issues. There is a developer community, conferences exclusively devoted to
SharePoint, MVPs, and authors you can hire. There are patterns and best practices available from
Microsoft. While SharePoint may have a steep learning curve, it will be much easier if you don’t walk
alone.
Windows SharePoint Foundation for Developers
Before you start coding, you should understand what the pieces of the puzzle are. From one perspective,
you can consider SharePoint to be built with tiers (although it’s not really a multitier architecture behind
the scenes, and the levels aren’t as loosely coupled as you might like). But treating such a complex
system as a collection of parts provides a well-structured way for you to understand it. From a developer
perspective, we can identify six layers:
• The execution environment
• The data layer
• The business logic layer
• The UI layer
• The security layer
• The developer toolbox
Microsoft SharePoint Server for Developers
SharePoint Server 2010 is everything SharePoint Foundation is. You can see SharePoint Foundation as a
functional subset of SharePoint Server. Additionally, many high-level features have been added to
SharePoint Server. The following list shows the areas that SharePoint server deals with exclusively:
• Content (document related)
• Search (mostly document related)
• Dashboards (data related)
• Forms and workflows (mostly data related)
• Community (people related)
• Content publishing (mostly people related)
