SharePoint Beta 2 SDKs Online and Available for Download

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Well, as you've probably already heard, yesterday was a big day for us here, what with the Beta releases of Office 2007, Windows Vista, and Windows Server "Longhorn". What you may not realize is that the Office developer documentation team has been working overtime to make sure there's lots of in-depth developer documentation ready to highlight all the great developer features built into Office this time around.

And with that, I take great pleasure in announcing the two projects that have been consuming most of my professional life for the past year: the Windows SharePoint Services V3 (Beta) and Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Beta) SDKs. Each SDK comes in two flavors: as a downloadable help file, or as online topics on MSDN.

To download the SDKs, go here:

To browse the SDKs online at MSDN:

But that's not all. We've totally redesigned the Office Developer Center and its sub-sites, and posted tons of new developer content for the 2007 Office System. (And I mean 'we' in the most general, corporate sense of the word, as I really had nothing to do with it.) Go take a look and see what's new for 2007 for your favorite Office app. For example, how about that new Office SharePoint Server 2007 Developer Center?

We've even launched a brand-spanking new developer portal to give Windows SharePoint Services developers a place of their very own: the Windows SharePoint Services Developer Center. And it too has lots of articles, demos, and screen casts to bring you up to speed on V3.

It's actually a little intimidating to look at how much developer extensibility there is in Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server this time around. So where do you start? Over the next few weeks I plan to excerpt some of the conceptual material from the SDKs to highlight the areas I've been documenting: the enterprise document management features. After that, if all goes well, I'll be able to give you previews of information that didn't make it into the Beta releases of the SDKs, but will be included in the final release.

But for now, dig in. There's plenty to keep you busy.

One article you might notice on both SharePoint portals is one that goes by the catchy title of Developer Introduction to Workflows for Windows SharePoint Services V3 and SharePoint Server 2007. This article pulls together information from both SDKs, as well as Windows Workflow Foundation, Office SharePoint Designer 2007, and InfoPath 2007 developer documentation, to provide a high-level overview of how workflows are implemented in the SharePoint Server and Office client environment. I wrote the article to give developers a unified picture of workflows in Office, and the tools and technologies you can use to create them. If you're interested at all in the new workflow foundation functionality, give it a read. And, as always, if you read it, please let us know what you thought by rating the article.

Written while listening to The New Pornographers: Electric Version