Sample chapter: SharePoint Development Practices and Techniques

SharePoint 2013 gives you more options, but it also requires you to make more choices, and it is important to make deliberate and well-informed choices to make sure that you end up with the best solution that you could possibly build for your specific situation and scenario. This chapter from Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2013 talks you through a lot of the choices and can help you make the right decisions.

Before you can start building a custom Microsoft SharePoint solution you will have to make sure you set up your development environment correctly. Because the hardware requirements for SharePoint 2013 are again a lot more demanding than they were for SharePoint 2010, setting up a new development environment might well mean that you have to acquire new hardware. There might be quite a bit of time between the moment that you order the hardware, whether from an external vendor or from an internal department, and when you can actually start using the hardware. This means that it’s important to start planning your SharePoint customizations early, so that waiting on the hardware will not interfere with your project planning.

When you have gotten the hardware, you will have to install your development environment. It is important to do this meticulously, to follow best practices and to make sure you document the entire configuration. Documentation is important if you have to create a second environment, or if you have to recreate your development environment.

When your SharePoint environment has been set up properly, you will need proper specifications so that you can start designing your solution. You will have to decide what type of solution will best suit your skills, the environment into which the solution will have to be deployed, and the functionality that you have to create. SharePoint 2013 introduces a new development approach, which means that you can now not only create farm solutions and sandboxes solution, but you can also create SharePoint apps. SharePoint 2013 also introduces a third application programming interface (API) by making Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs available that allow you to use simple HTTP requests and responses to perform CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations on SharePoint data.

All these additions give you more options, but they also require you to make more choices, and it is important to make deliberate and well-informed choices to make sure that you end up with the best solution that you could possibly build for your specific situation and scenario. This chapter talks you through a lot of the choices and can help you make the right decisions.

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