11 - Introduction to SharePoint Development

Abstract

This chapter presents an introduction to SharePoint development. It provides an architectural overview of the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007 platform from a developer’s perspective. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is built upon ASP.NET 2.0, and as such it inherits all the new enhanced capabilities of ASP.NET 2.0. ASP.NET 2.0 offers significant improvements over its predecessor, such as the introduction of master pages, a native Web Part framework, and pluggable virtual path providers that allow one to retrieve and control the parsing of .aspx pages. In addition, Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 (FrontPage) remains a very popular tool for editing WSS 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. SharePoint Designer contains a host of designer tools and SharePoint integration components that not only ease the customization of SharePoint content but also aid the actual administration and management of the content. From a manageability perspective, SharePoint Designer introduces the concept of contributor mode by providing SharePoint administrators with an additional layer for administering who can do what to the content of their SharePoint sites. Contributor mode is enabled by default and is controlled by a combination of SharePoint permission levels and SharePoint Designer Contributor settings. This chapter also provides an overview of the book, which examines the components of particular interest to developers and Web designers who wish to customize and extend the out-of-the-box functionality. It explains how the underlying architecture has changed since Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and discusses some of the major enhancements that the new architecture brings to the table.