Using the SharePoint Foundation Client APIs

Applies to: SharePoint Foundation 2010

This section of the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Software Development Kit (SDK) provides overview information, programming tasks, and guidelines to help you use the client-side APIs that are provided in SharePoint Foundation for accessing site and list data remotely from a client computer or server.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 provides many options for building and integrating applications and line-of-business systems with a SharePoint deployment, including a client-side object model, support for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services, and a Representational State Transfer (REST) interface, in addition to the legacy ASP.NET web services. The new services in SharePoint Foundation 2010 provide a streamlined development experience and easy access to SharePoint functionality from remote clients. SharePoint Foundation supports Web 2.0 types of applications that are hosted in the browser and written in ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) or Microsoft Silverlight 2.0, in addition to classical .NET client applications, or applications built on other platforms and languages. All these applications have access to an extended collection of web services.

In This Section

SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model – The new client-side object model provides remote access to the functionality of the SharePoint Foundation server-side object model. In previous releases of SharePoint Foundation, SOAP web services provided access to only a fraction of the server-side object model, but in SharePoint Foundation 2010, the client object model fills many of the gaps.

ASP.NET Web Services – The legacy web services provide remote access to a SharePoint Foundation deployment through SOAP web services.

SharePoint Foundation REST Interface – The new SharePoint Foundation REST interface exposes lists and libraries as a relational data service, and serves as a standards-based interface for interoperability with other platforms.

WCF Services in SharePoint Foundation 2010 – If the combination of the other client APIs is not sufficient, extend SharePoint Foundation with your own custom web service. By default SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports creating not only custom ASP.NET web services, as in previous releases, but also custom WCF web services.

Walkthrough: Creating and Implementing a Custom WCF Service in SharePoint Foundation – This walkthrough shows how to create a WCF service that uses the server-side object model, and a Windows Forms Application that implements the service and that uses the new client-side object model and REST interface.

See Also

Concepts

Deciding Which SharePoint 2010 API to Use

Other Resources

Client Class Library

JavaScript Class Library

SharePoint Foundation 2010 Web Services