Evaluating the SharePoint Guidance
Developing SharePoint Applications provides useful information in specific areas of SharePoint development without requiring you to first understand the more complex and general topics, such as the patterns that are used in the reference implementations, or how to develop an application with the reusable library components. Architects and developers will need to devote some time and effort to fully understand and evaluate the reference implementations and reusable components.
The guidance is divided into the following four areas:
- Documentation
- Library of reusable components
- Training Management application
- Partner Portal application
Some of the documentation and the Training Management application are from the previous release. Some of this earlier documentation has been integrated with guidance from the current release.
The documentation provides practical engineering guidance to various aspects of building SharePoint applications. It is organized to provide useful information that is independent of the reference implementations and reusable components. Many of the topics refer to the reference implementations so that you can see how the general principles that are discussed in the documentation are applied. In particular, understanding the Partner Portal application, which is a relatively complex SharePoint application, is easier if you read the general guidance first and then refer back to the application.
The library of reusable components demonstrates many of the principles that are discussed in the documentation. For example, the guidance includes discussions of the patterns that the components implement. You should study the SharePoint Guidance Library documentation before you incorporate the components into your own applications. The documentation explains how they are designed and how to use them in common situations. It also points out implementation details such as that there are sometimes dependencies between the components. For example, the SharePoint Logger depends on the SharePoint service locator.
The Training Management application demonstrates many principles of SharePoint development that apply to an application with a single site. The following are some of the scenarios where the Training Management application can provide guidance:
- You are using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
- You are relatively new to SharePoint or would like to learn how to apply basic best practices to your application.
- You want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint application
- You want to learn how to build a relatively complex application for a single site.
- You want to learn how to develop workflows for SharePoint.
- You want to learn how to use lists and how to use event receivers with lists.
- You want to learn how to package features and solutions.
The Partner Portal application shows how to design and implement enterprise-scale SharePoint applications. The following are some of the scenarios where the Partner Portal application can provide guidance:
- You are using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
- You want to provide an extranet for external organizations. The extranet includes collaboration sites.
- You want to publish and deploy content.
- You want to integrate line-of-business (LOB) information with the application and create published content that includes LOB information.
- You want to aggregate and cross-link information.
- You want to be able to navigate across multiple site collections.
- You want to incorporate best practices for performance and manageability issues.