In the 2003 editions of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, the learning curve for SharePoint development was significant as developers had to have a keen understanding of web development technologies such as CSS, JavaScipt and HTML in addition to the .net 1.1 framework as well as the webpart framework of the time. Then along came the 2007 editions of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies in the form of MOSS and WSS v3. While there were vast improvements of the underlying development framework as most of the technical code base (but not necessarily concepts) supporting SharePoint were paved over as the collaborative framework and application server were rewritten in .net 2.0 with snippets of .net 3.0 components. This reduced the headaches of most .net developers attempting to work within the SharePoint framework as they now just had to learn the the SharePoint SDK rather than attempting to learn to pre-render HTML for their results in the previous edition as webparts were written. Additionally the solutions and features frameworks were added which made the management of added capabilities significantly easier and cleaner.
With SharePoint Server 2010, the core platform of SharePoint has been kept in place, but a lot of additional capabilities have been added to make it the developers collaborative platform dream. However, with great power comes a lot of responsibility and a lot of room for error and friction.
So where do you turn when you run into such problems? Well there are several places to turn to when you need SharePoint help to include the MSDN Forums, SharePoint Overflow, Twitter, and your local user group.
Thursday, 28 January from 5:30-7:30 PM at SnagAJob in Glen Allen, the Richmond SharePoint User Group will be meeting. And to assist in helping developers transition into the SharePoint Server 2010 mindset, none other than Josh Carlisle from B&R Solutions will be presenting on “Reducing the Friction of SharePoint Development with SharePoint 2010”.
If you’re free and able, it looks to be a great presentation and excellent information to apply and integrate into your SharePoint delivery teams. More information about the Richmond SharePoint Users Group can be found at:
Who: Josh Carlisle and other SharePoint Users, Practitioners and Professionals
What: Richmond SharePoint Users Group
Where: SnagAJob, 4880 Cox Road, Glen Allen, VA
When: 28 January from 5:30-7:30 PM
The Tech Blog of Dan Usher 