SUMMARY
There are many different types of options you have when developing SharePoint solutions, which range from farm-level to sandboxed to cloud-hosted to SharePoint-hosted. Each one of these options provides different levels of SharePoint API support and support for broader Web technologies (such as PhP or HTML5).
Regardless of the development option you choose, you will find yourself running into several common tasks you’ll engage in as a SharePoint developer time and time again. These include creating Web Parts, creating SharePoint-hosted apps, accessing and managing data, creating cloud-hosted apps, creating event receivers, creating ASPX pages, and creating master pages. It is important to be familiar with these tasks to gain a fundamental base of development knowledge. Understanding how you can leverage different API choices within these tasks is also important for you to understand.
Many of the topics covered in this chapter resurface throughout the book as you write more code and explore more of the programmatic capabilities that SharePoint has to offer. Thus, as you move throughout this book, try and frame each application discussion with an understanding of the type of solution and how you might use the different SharePoint APIs within that solution.
WHAT YOU LEARNED IN THIS CHAPTER
| ITEM | DESCRIPTION |
| Web Part | SharePoint leverages the ASP.NET framework and provides different types of Web Parts to use when building solutions. The most common Web Parts include the Standard Web Part (baseline Web Part available in SharePoint), Visual Web Part (adds a designer experience for the UI to Standard Web Parts), Silverlight Web Part, and Data View Web Parts (exposes list data in a custom-formatted way). |
| SharePoint-hosted app | This is a lightweight app you can deploy to a specific site collection (such as list view or content type). |
| Site column | You can reuse this custom column across a SharePoint site. |
| Content type | This is a custom object with metadata that can range from predefined columns to custom documents that you can reuse across a SharePoint site. |
| Cloud-hosted app | This is an Autohosted or Provider-hosted app that you build and deploy to the cloud (for example, Windows Azure). |
| List | This is a standard way of representing data in SharePoint. You interact with list data using the server-side object model, CSOM, or Rest APIs. |
| Event receiver | This is an event that is triggered when the system or user performs an action. |
| ASPX page | This is the standard page in SharePoint. Built on ASP.NET, SharePoint supports simple ASPX pages (no controls) or more complex pages that come predefined with controls and layouts (for example, Web Part page). |
| Master page | A master page provides a single point of branding and structure that you can leverage across a SharePoint site. |