Introduction

Welcome to the world of customization and development for SharePoint Online in Office 365. Although Office 365 offers lots of opportunities for businesses and developers, it also represents a different development and deployment paradigm from what most SharePoint developers are accustomed to in a traditional on-premise environment. Our purpose in writing this book is to help bridge the gap between on-premise and cloud-based SharePoint development and get developers up to speed as quickly as possible on what can be done and how to do it.

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for .NET/ASP.NET developers who have never developed for SharePoint Online before. Notice that we said .NET developers, not SharePoint developers. Although being a SharePoint developer will certainly be helpful, it’s not a requirement for getting through this book. The idea is that anyone with existing Microsoft development skills can apply those skills to developing for SharePoint Online. Part of the reason we targeted this audience is that Office 365 tends to attract a lot of small and mid-size businesses that might already have .NET development expertise in-house, but are often lacking SharePoint developers. SharePoint developers, however, will still find this book useful because it covers some key differences in developing for the cloud rather than an on-premise environment.

Conventions

Throughout this book, we use the terms online and cloud-based interchangeably to refer to SharePoint Online and the Office 365 environment. We use the term on-premise to refer to traditional SharePoint 2010 environments that are hosted internally by a business or organization.

As we discuss in Chapter 1, we also sometimes use plan names and plan categories interchangeably while discussing available features in Office 365. For example, the terms E plans, enterprise-level plans, and Office 365 for enterprises all mean the same thing and refer to the same set of available features.

While we included some reference material in this book, the book is not intended to be a reference manual for Office 365 or SharePoint Online. Microsoft has its own set of help/reference documentation, and we provide links to it when appropriate. Our focus here is more on the tools and techniques involved in SharePoint development as well as sharing some real-world tips and best practices with our readings that we’ve learned through years of experience.

Downloading the Code

The code for the examples shown in this book is available on the Apress website: http://www.apress.com. A link can be found on the book’s information page under the Source Code/Downloads tab. This tab is located underneath the Related Titles section of the page.

Contacting the Author

We love to hear from our readers and welcome your feedback about the book. Bart can be contacted by visiting his blog at http://www.SharePointTapRoom.com or by e-mailing him at [email protected].