How good/bad is sharepoint programming? [closed]

Answer 1

I have like Kirk also worked with SharePoint since the 2003 beta version and am still liking it. You can of course always wish for something to have been better thought through - but I guess you can say that about almost any Enterprise product. To me, the positives far outweight the negatives when it comes to building solutions on top of the SharePoint platform.

Let me as a developer share with you my top 5 good things and top 5 bad things about SharePoint:

Top 5 Good Things about SharePoint

1. It is a comphrensive platform. Makes it a hell lot faster to develop and deploy fully featured, standardized, scalable and high availability Web solutions like a corporate Intranet and Extranet.
2. It has huge momentum. Microsoft continues improving it and it gets much better with every release, the community is great and growing, online resources are good and growing, more and more books are coming out, many great free add-ons and good third-party products popping up all the time, and there are also great conferences to go to.
3. Very modular platform where you can package your own stuff into Solutions, features, Web parts, Templates, Content types and more.
4. It leverages standard Microsoft technologies like .NET, ASP.NET, IIS and SQL Server. So you will not get stuck with one specific skill set.
5. In the current job market, you are much better off with .NET + SharePoint skills than just .NET skills. It is something like saying you have SAP experience or are a BI specialist.

Top 5 Bad Things about SharePoint

1. Steep learning curve. It takes at least two years to become a good SharePoint developer - even if you are already good at C# and .NET. You will need the first year to just understand all the concepts in the platform and then another year to get really familiar with them.
2. Inadequate development tools. Visual Studio hardly knows anything about SharePoint - but I hear this is going to change big time with VS 2010 :-)
3. Not always possible to use the latest and coolest .NET features. It always takes SharePoint a few years to adopt the latest and greatest stuff from the .NET platform teams. Just think about Linq and AJAX. I am curious to see if/when SharePoint 2010 will support .NET 4.0.
4. Often a need to find work-arounds to quirky problems/inconsistencies in the platform.
5. Changing APIs. Well, at least this was a pain moving from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007. I hope the transition to SharePoint 2010 will be a smoother ride.

Answer 2

good =============================[=]=== bad

• setup/administration/updating is a pain
• developing/debugging is a pain
• documentation is a joke

Answer 3

It's simultaneously the most frustrating and the most rewarding experience you'll have. While the reward comes (at least partially) in the form of a great salary (compared to straight web dev), the frustrations are nothing that can't be overcome with stackoverflow and google at your side.

I've been doing SharePoint development since 2003, and the valleys of "I FREAKING HATE SHAREPOINT!" are always off-set by the moments of "DUDE, THAT'S FREAKING AWESOME!"

If you are offered an entry-level position doing SharePoint, I'd take it in a heartbeat. You'll get on-the-job training on one of the hottest technologies around.

Answer 4

I knew nothing about SharePoint 3 months ago. Since then I've had to create a couple of custom web parts for my company's new support site and I have to agree with your friend, it's a big mess.

At first I was impressed by how much you could do with the platform without any coding at all. But it's been frustrating getting my stuff to work properly. I tried to incorporate a user control I had written earlier that worked great in a regular web app, but a key part simply wouldn't work in SharePoint for reasons that are still beyond me. I managed to find a workaround, but lost two weeks in the process.

It was also disheartening to learn that the development environment has to be a machine actually running SharePoint, which has to run under Windows 2003/2008. I had to set up a virtual machine on my existing system, which isn't a big deal but it's one more hurdle you have to overcome.

In all, it seemed way too confusing for what you're trying to do. I agree with the sentiment that a lot of time is spent on installation, configuration, and deployment versus actual development. Maybe the 2010 version will be better. It's certainly not a product I would look forward to working with.

Answer 5

SharePoint can be frustrating at times. It's a "maturing product" according to Microsoft, so when you do something wrong, you get nice errors like "an error occurred" or "cannot complete action". CAML is something that requires great patience. The documentation on it is not very good and you can waste a great deal of time over a stupid syntax error.

All in all, it's a decent platform, but it will probably cause you to get gray hair sooner than your peers.

Answer 6

I have decent .net dev experience and 3 months on SP, my experience so far:

The good:

I think SP is good for application with simple data model, preferably read-heavy. A huge strong point is what users/administrators can achieve with configuration only. Change data structure on the fly, modify look and feel, etc. A wonderful platform for "my books" kind of things..

The bad:

But there are lot of things where SP stumbles and falls (on you). For example it is hard to work when non-trivial logic is required, especially aggregation functions over foreign key relationships. And of course the lack of transactions. Maintaining data integrity could become a problem. Beware of this when you consider working on a specific project.

There's little compile-time support, majority of your tasks will include messing with resources looked up by calling it by name as a string. It can be considered "flexible" and "simple", but its just too error-prune for my taste and slows down development. Of course this is not only SP thing, but MVC/webforms seem more easily pushable toward the strongly typed world.

If you like managed world then deal with the fact that the vast majority of SP is non-managed code, giving you exceptions like "HResult 8000072F" with next to no stacktrace to hint you on what could have failed.

Deployment and bug reproducibility has caused quite many frustrating days. WSS takes the whole machine for itself, files needed to run the app are scattered around DB, file system (and quite often GAC). To have a basic separation of projects, expect to be working on lots of different VMs.

The tool support is quite poor (not tried VS 2010). Better expect to make friends with command line and scripting. Expect debugging experience to be slow. Unit-testing is quite hard to do..

My personal conclusion: SP has it's niche but it is not a platform a .Net programmer can enjoy. The user experience may have some occasional "WOW", but the developer experience did not. This could be the "steep learning curve" talking, but maybe it's just the way it is.