OTHER TOOLS FOR SHAREPOINT DEVELOPMENT
This chapter covers much about the core tools that are available for SharePoint development. Of course, you’ll come across many other niche tools in addition to the main ones — some of which can be proprietary to your organization. Two of these lesser known tools are quite helpful in the right situation: Expression Blend, which is for design, especially when you’re building out Silverlight-based applications, and Fiddler, for debugging.
Developing with Expression Blend
Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer, and Napa are your core developer tools for SharePoint, so you won’t see as much coverage here for Expression Blend as you did for the aforementioned tools. However, getting at least an introduction to Expression is important, because it provides a great suite of applications offering Web, design, and encoding features.
One of the main reasons to introduce Expression Blend here is that it offers a great way to design Silverlight-based and Deep Zoom applications. Silverlight is a great way to create rich media and dynamic applications — and this dynamic user experience begins with the use of Expression Blend. Furthermore, Deep Zoom can also provide some interesting media experiences with images. For example, the Hard Rock Memorabilia site (http://memorabilia.hardrock.com) leverages the Deep Zoom capabilities within a Silverlight application embedded within an HTML page — see Figure 3-32.
The experience on the site enables you to zoom in on the different images on the page with remarkable clarity because the application refocuses each time it zooms into an image. Although you can create Deep Zoom applications like the one in Figure 3-32, you can also create more everyday business applications using Silverlight. For example, much like you would create a WinForm application using Visual Studio, you could just as easily create a Silverlight application using Expression Blend. The added value you get with Silverlight is additional rich-design functionality built into Expression that provides support for animation, behaviors, action triggers, gradient design, and so on — so it truly offers much more of a design experience than the designer that ships with the Silverlight templates within Visual Studio. Figure 3-33 shows how you can create dynamic controls in your Silverlight applications using Expression Blend.
After you create these rich controls, you can then import them into Visual Studio and add event handlers to them as shown in Figure 3-34, enabling you to combine the design and development experience into one seamless, managed process.
Design is an important aspect of SharePoint development, and as you evolve in your SharePoint journey you will begin to look for more ways to enhance the design experience for your application development.
Debugging Using Fiddler
One other tool that you’ll likely want to learn how to use is Fiddler, an HTTP debugging application written by Eric Lawrence. Fiddler is an excellent way to capture key statistics and metadata for network transactions, data packets (for example, XML or JSON data), performance and load times, and so on (see Figure 3-35). As you build and deploy your apps, especially now that you’ll be focusing some of your time on cloud-based apps, tasks such as understanding how and where different traffic is being routed within your application, monitoring load times, and detecting bottlenecks, will be essential to building performing and usable apps. Fiddler provides these capabilities through its tracing functions (and more), as you can see in Figure 3-35.
You can download Fiddler for free from: http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/.