How good/bad is sharepoint programming? [closed]

Answer 1

It's clear from the other answers that there's a lot of frustration for SharePoint developers.

The givens are:

1. Yes you have to develop on a server product Windows 2003 or Windows 2008
2. A lot of development information comes from blogs of varying quality
3. The product tries to be everything to everyone but the reality is that the product is so large there are areas of speciality required

It is definitely a technology that is still maturing for developers. The amount of information available from the developer community and Microsoft has grown enormously in the last 2 years. There's a lot of guidance coming out of the patterns & practices team for SharePoint which can be found here: http://www.codeplex.com/spg

As for some of the other comments - it's the fastest growing Microsoft product measured on licenses sold, not necessarily on installations! And yes, the functionality that comes with WSS 3.0 for free is pretty amazing.

There's a very wide scope of what 'SharePoint development' could encompass. It could be pure web content development driven through the web browser and tools like SharePoint Designer. Or getting down and dirty writing custom ASP.NET web parts, Windows Workflow, custom ASP.NET web services and pages hosted in SharePoint and much more.

There are a lot of out-of-the-box web services that come with SharePoint that allow integration with other systems and some people might call programming against that API 'SharePoint development'.

I think the rule of thumb with SharePoint in general is that on the surface it appears to be an all encompassing product that tries to be everything to anyone. Sometimes you don't have to scratch the surface very far to realise that the platform isn't going to solve your particular business needs without significant customisation. It's sometimes that last 10% of required feature that costs you 90% of the effort!

Answer 2

I'm going to buck the trend here a bit. I see SharePoint as a development platform - plain and simple. It utilizes other technologies such as IIS, ASP.NET, SQL Server, and Windows Workflow so I don't have to reinvent the wheel. It lets me focus on solving business problems instead of worrying about plumbing and system-level code.

Don't get me wrong, SharePoint does come with baggage, but if you like to solve real-world business problems and not just sling code, it has a lot to offer. I am continuously amazed at how rich the platform is with WSSv3 - which is free.

If you like to align yourself with Microsoft technology, then you need to realize that SharePoint is here to stay and will continue to get better and be more commonplace. The current version (v3 - WSSv3 / MOSS 2007) is lacking in AJAX, social networking, and other functionality/technology. The v4 version is just around the corner and is bound to improve in these areas.

In regards to some of the negatives I have read in this thread:

• I have written web parts that live in SharePoint that utilize the AJAX toolkit and so have co-workers of mine. One co-worker is very active with Silverlight web parts.

• Yes, you do tend to develop on Windows Server 2003/2008. This doesn't bother me and I don't spend much time at all on installation and configuration. I do use virtual machines for development environments sometimes and agree that can sometimes be a pain.

What I am able to do, however, is configure some things instead of develop. Authorization, done; provisioning, done; row-level security, done; basic UI CRUD, done; deployment to multiple front ends, done; search, done. Now I have time to focus on solving the business problem.

If you are going to do SharePoint development, you need to get started on the right foot. I highly recommend Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 to get to the meat of what a developer can/should do within SharePoint.

For what it's worth, I've been a developer for over 20 years working on Unix and Windows in several different languages and technology. I've been focusing on SharePoint v3 since it's beta days and am happy with the direction I have chosen.

Answer 3

I was originally an ASP.NET developer building Web Content Management Systems and working with Document Management Systems. SharePoint was a natural progression in this space leveraging on the skills that I already had on top of a platform.

I did a presentation on this last year that may be of interest.

More information is available here: http://sharepointdevwiki.com/x/HYBfAQ

Answer 4

I am 3 months into a SharePoint project that will be ending soon.

I spend my days going through error logs trying to figure out why various SharePoint components do not function like MS says they should. Documentation is regarded by many in development industry as "...worst I've ever seen". Good luck finding anything useful on an MS related site.

Many "social features" depend on UPS (User Profile Service) which is notoriously buggy and difficult to configure; google it and you'll see. On my project it took multiple developers weeks and a Ph.D in EE to get UPS working at all. All this for a webservice! Due to ongoing stability problems said company eventually hired a SharePoint author who proclaimed "I believe in this platform!". Yea right. I wonder how much he's getting paid to say that. However take heart, with each new MS Cummulative Update, UPS gets closer and closer to being viable, at least for a development environment. It has come a long way from the initial release when it completely didn't work at all.

You will spend much of your time configuring Active Directory, IIS, ForeFront Identity Management Services, SQLServer, and Server2008 settings. Keep in mind most of these settings will conflict with one another so be prepared to spend plenty of time on SharePoint blogs looking for work-arounds. In fact most SharePoint blogs are dedicated to workarounds and hacks just to get SharePoint to work or at least bring it up to functionality of basic website. I thought the whole point of a platform with pre-built functionality was to decrease your work load, not increase it. If you like to lay code and not play admin or blog sleuth, this is not the platform for you.

As mentioned elsewhere development requirements are insane. SharePoint Server(the full version of the product) can/should only be run on Windows server. For me this means virtual machine. 8GB ram is really minimum you can get away with. I ended up buying core i5, 16GB, and SSD just to build reasonably fast dev environment. This is web development, not video editing.

If you and/or your team are lucky enough to get SharePoint mildly stable in a production environment, end users will be treated to 5-second page loads, slow response times for almost any type of request, and possibly the most unintuitive UI in recent computing history. One of SharePoint's major attractions is that you can edit web pages on the fly by adding various types of webparts or using SharePoint Designer to actually change structure of page. This can get experienced developers into a lot of trouble so non-technical user's whom I believe this feature is targeted towards, will die. They will be met with a chorus of Correlation Id errors that give them a very helpful and informative GUID.

Developers and end users both loose when it comes to this mess. The only thing SharePoint is good for is making me believe in necessity of opensource.

PS - Please don't attack my spelling or grammar. I am not an English major.

Answer 5

I'm surprised at all of the positive responses. Let me just ask, do you mind creating your markup in code? As in HtmlWriter.BeginTag("br") (or whatever, sorry for not knowing the HtmlWriter api). That's considered best practices for creating redistributable web parts.

How about the Ajax Toolkit? Oops, off limits. Doesn't work due to a missing doc-type in the header.

And your laptop is running Windows server 2003, right? Because of course Sharepoint won't run on anything else.

I understand people defending their platform, but as someone who has had to do some work in Sharepoint, but doesn't any more ... let me say that developing for Sharepoint is the worst development experience of my life. Now, I've been pretty careful in my choices to date, so it's not the worst possible experience, but it's down there. Or, to put it another way, I would much prefer working in PHP than Sharepoint.

Answer 6

SharePoint is a v2 product...v3 is due in 2010, and it's the fastest growing product in MS's history (supposedly). v2 is short of mature, and it definitely leaves something to be desired for those of us who develop, but there's a lot of tools out there that make developing against it easier (stsdev, being one).

It's something that you'll be seeing more and more of if you stay in the Windows realm. It's a powerful platform and the future of it looks very promising.

From a developer's perspective, it's a bit frustrating that they've thought about developing against it as sort of an afterthought, as most Windows-based applications are. The end user wins in priority, that's for sure.

SharePoint work is challenging and rewarding, even without the development aspect of it. You're affecting the entire organization and actually helping businesses run better. The development aspect will frustrate you from time to time, but it all tends to even out.