The purpose of SharePoint lists is to store data. This may be information in the form of a contacts list about your customers or the document library we previously created to store proposals (Microsoft Office documents in general). As a SharePoint developer, you will want to access the data both within the SharePoint environment but equally importantly from outside the SharePoint environment. For example, you may have a Windows Forms application, Windows Presentation Foundation application, a Silverlight (Rich Internet) application, or a regular web application in which you are using JavaScript. And in these applications, you may need to access data that is in fact stored within one of your SharePoint site collections.

In the example for this chapter, let us say we are interested in the Top 5 proposals from our Proposals library ranked in descending order by dollar value.