Developing Applications Using Visual Studio

One appealing feature of SharePoint is that it supports application development in many shapes and forms. Because SharePoint is built on the .NET platform, developers can theoretically create applications to perform any set of functions required by the organization. SharePoint 2010 is intended to partner with SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 to make it even easier for developers to create powerful and stable applications. Additional enhancements in the development arena include

• A new client object model enabling code to be run on a client that was once relegated to running only on the SharePoint server.

• Rest APIs allowing for standards-based XML over HTTP communication with SharePoint.

• LINQ support allowing for integrated, object-like access to SharePoint data from familiar .NET languages such as C# and VB.Net.

• Sandboxed solutions are solutions safely deployed to a SharePoint site and are limited from doing harm to the farm through code access security (CAS). This has obvious implications for multi-tenancy hosting environments.

• Import, modify, and extend solution packages (.wsp).

• Develop SharePoint solutions with SharePoint project type templates and SharePoint project item templates.

• Create web parts and application pages for a SharePoint site.

Chapter 29 provides step-by-step instructions on how to create a Visual Studio web part that leverages LINQ to render a SharePoint list in a custom format.