How good/bad is sharepoint programming? [closed]

Answer 1

My small web shop briefly embraced SharePoint a couple of years back; we did consulting, customization, training, and so on. It's true that you get a lot out the box, and I understand it's improved a lot; but the overall experience was very negative and we've never looked back.

1. The users that we trained on it absolutely hated the user interface and it was very frustrating not to be able to fix the things that are wrong with it.
2. Customizing Sharepoint's visual presentation is not for the faint of heart. The incompetence of whoever wrote the CSS at Microsoft is just horrifying. I still have nightmares.
3. For whatever reason they didn't just design it as a garden-variety web app, which makes setting up a development environment a huge pain in the neck.

In general, SharePoint falls short of its promise in a number of ways that are just mystifying: Things that would seem like no-brainers require all kinds of custom development.

We've gone back to rolling our own solutions for customers; they're much happier with that arrangement, and so are we.

Answer 2

Sharepoint IS a huge mess.

1. The generated mark up is the worst I have ever seen.
2. It has equally bad CSS to go a long with that mark up.
3. God have mercy on the soul that has to restyle or extend the client side functionality of a sharepoint application.
4. The entire platform flies in the face of good architectural design.
5. Data Integrity is a huge problem with the platform, as there are no transactions.
6. The API is surprisingly bug infested and it won't take an hour after working with the API to run into bugs that will have you scouring the web and further exacerbating data integrity problems.
7. Proper unit testing is very difficult to do on the platform.
8. The platform is big and is cram packed with "everything", however everything Sharepoint does it does poorly. You could easily find other frameworks or platforms which do the job better and would be a much neater fit to your or your client's requirements.
9. The learning curve is steep, which would be fine if the documentation for the platform (especially the API) was any good.
10. Browser compatibility, Sharepoint is IE only (attributed to its horrendous markup, CSS and javascript).

It has to be said, the platform makes money, but more as a money making scheme. Developer skills in Sharepoint are rare and people with those skills are paid well. Clients pay through their teeth for Sharepoint custom dev and development houses as a result do their best to convince their clients that Sharepoint is the perfect fit for everything.

My opinion, Sharepoint is not a development platform, but a money making platform.

Edit: I also forgot to add 11. Its a resource pig like nothing you've ever seen before.

Answer 3

I am happy to report having a positive experience with SharePoint programming. I agree that the out-of-the box masterpages and css are pretty bad, and the here and there lack of documentation in the API can be very frustrating at sometimes, but these are minor setbacks if you see SharePoint as a development framework instead as a finite product which can be customized. I have read someone at MS describing the SharePoint as "modeling clay", with the out-of-the-box templates merely as "demos" of what can be achieved.

I find it quite easy and straightforward to build a custom master page (with the proper Doc Type in the header to remove the awful BackCompat and enable CSS1Compat, for example) or have my aspx pages with code-behind or whatever. Bottom line is - whatever you can do within a website in pure asp.net 2.0, you can do the same with SharePoint and benefit from its scalability, deployment techniques, API, permission model, audits, document storage system, InfoPath integration, workflows, etc.

I guess that in the end it really depends on your point of view: is SharePoint a development platform with a "demo" collection of site templates, or just a semi-finite product which allows you to customize it here and there?

Answer 4

I find that the biggest frustration with SharePoint, even the latest release, is the lack of attention to documentation. There are so many poorly-documented API calls. I can feel my blood pressure rising just from posting this answer.

Answer 5

It's a (good?) way to pay the bills....

Answer 6

It varies a lot depending on the way the project is run - if you work within the design of SharePoint you can achieve a lot without much effort. If you get requirements that go against that and the client isn't willing to compromise, it can get pretty frustrating.

You also tend to get a lot of environments that haven't been set up right - even things as basic as source control and reproducible deployment are often left out. The infrastructure people often don't understand SharePoint, so you get issues like not being able to connect your development environment to a network.

However, most of these issues are quite easily solved if there is someone involved who knows what they are doing. Once you get past any project and environment issues it's quite a good platform to work with.

The official documentation isn't particularly helpful, but the available unofficial documentation and tools have improved a huge amount since I started working with the platform.