SharePoint from an ASP.Net developer’s vantage:

What’s this about?

This initial series of blogs is aimed at those seasoned ASP.Net developers who find themselves in the new world of collaboration, specifically Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server (SPS). From the trenches I saw the demand for development and knowledge of SPS on the rise. One reason for this was renewed investment in information systems by major corporations. The globalization we have all witnessed in the last few years has created the need for centralized collaboration and SPS is currently in its second iteration and is a very powerful tool.

SPS has a lot under its hood, indeed many a tree has been sacrificed on the alters of major book publishers so I’m not about to do that. Instead I will expend some electrons on a get up to speed series of what I believe to be the most salient point for impatient ASP.Net developer.

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Getting Started

The principle component for SharePoint is called a WebPart. These are self contained UI plug-ins that can be added to any number of SharePoint web pages. A WebPart is analogous to a Server Control within a traditional ASP.Net web page. They contain internal code for logic and UI rendering. Most publications show you how to override a base class’ rendering method to manually create the required HTML populated with application data ala classic ASP model.

To build, debug and deploy a WebPart requires a SPS install. This is turn requires Windows 2003 Server. If you are typical ASP.net developer then you probably have neither.

At PointBridge the standard setup is for a XP client to host a Virtual PC 2003 Server virtual machine. Once your environment is up and running there are a few things to note:

• SharePoint installs itself on Port 80 and uses a HttpHandler module to process all incoming traffic. This means setting up an ASP.Net project needs some manual configuration to set up.
• SharePoint runs with particular security credentials that may not suffice for some applications that install in sub folder (more later)

Over the coming few blogs I hope to part with some knowledge on how to best deal with a typical install and how to get some code up and running.