Q&A with Peter Jausovec on SharePoint 2010 Development and Certification
Please tell our audience about your Addison-Wesley Professional title SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010.
The main goal of this book is to help the reader succeed and be productive using Visual Studio to program for SharePoint 2010. The book starts with an introduction to SharePoint development; in the first part readers learn about the SharePoint UI, different ways to extend SharePoint and SharePoint object models. After that, we switch to Visual Studio introduction and take the readers through the Visual Studio’s support for SharePoint development.
Compared to other SharePoint development books, this book’s main focus is on Visual Studio. You don’t need to know everything going on in SharePoint in order to start developing for it. Visual Studio takes care of that; it helps you be more productive and brings SharePoint development closer to new developers. Throughout the book we use Visual Studio, and we explain how to create the most common elements of SharePoint solutions, like lists, workflows, web parts, and connections to business data. There’s also a whole chapter focused on SharePoint object model and packaging and deployment.
Who is the chief audience for your book? What do you assume in terms of the readers’ prior experience with .NET development in general and SharePoint development in particular?
In order to develop for SharePoint, a lot of different knowledge is required, such as SharePoint knowledge, some ASP.NET knowledge, general programming knowledge, etc. Even if you don’t know about all the technologies involved, the book will guide you. Since Visual Studio is the focus of the book, you should have some basic knowledge about Visual Studio and .NET development to make the most out of it. As for SharePoint, basic knowledge is helpful but not required. You’ll learn about the SharePoint development through Visual Studio, and along the way you’ll learn how to create lists, content types, workflow and other parts of a SharePoint solution.
As for the audiencewhether you’re a new developer who never used SharePoint before, or an ASP.NET developer who’s trying to expand his knowledge and start developing for SharePoint, or even an experienced SharePoint developer trying to be more productive or use Visual Studio to develop for SharePointthis book is for you.
What are the coolest features, both within SharePoint 2010 as well as in the Visual Studio 2010 toolset, to benefit developers?
There are a lot of new and cool features in Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint development. In my opinion, the biggest and the coolest feature that might benefit experienced developers is extensibility. Even if the numerous SharePoint templates and features provided in Visual Studio are not enough, with extensibility you can extend them or create your own features inside Visual Studio that will make you more productive.
For new developers, the Visual Studio templates for SharePoint development are the biggest benefit. Visual Studio takes care of a lot of plumbing, and in a way lowers the learning curve for new developers. If you have already developed for SharePoint prior to Visual Studio, you will truly appreciate the work that’s been done in Visual Studio 2010 to make the lives of SharePoint developers easier; these improvements allow developers to be more productive and focus on their SharePoint solutions instead of worrying how to create a SharePoint package or how to deploy it.
What tools are required in order for an aspiring SharePoint developer to get started and reduce his or her learning curve?
In order to get started with SharePoint development, you need to install both Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint on the same machine with 64-bit operating system. Previous versions of SharePoint required a machine with server operating system; however, SharePoint 2010 doesn’t have that requirement anymore. This means that if you already have your development machine with Visual Studio 2010, the only thing you need is to install SharePoint 2010 on the same machine. The book contains guides on how to install Visual Studio and SharePoint 2010 on a server operating system as well as on a client operating system (such as Windows 7). If you don’t feel comfortable installing SharePoint on your development machine, there’s always an option of installing both Visual Studio and SharePoint on a virtual machine. One thing to note: if you’re installing SharePoint on a virtual machine, SharePoint requires at least 4GB of RAM.
In closing, what would you like to tell our audience with respect to how they can use their book to build or augment their SharePoint 2010 development expertise?
In my opinion, everyonefrom beginners and new developers to SharePoint expertscan find and learn something new from this book. If you just started your SharePoint development career, this book will help you to get up to speed with the Visual Studio 2010 tools for SharePoint development. If you are an experienced SharePoint developer, you probably know what the pain-points for SharePoint development are, and you can leverage the tools to overcome those pain points and increase your productivity.