5.4. Summary

Windows SharePoint Services 2007 provides the foundation for all of the Office Server 2007 products, including the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Part of this foundation is a rich object model, web services façade, and an eventing subsystem that is publicly available for developers. The object model, available to code running locally on the SharePoint server, contains 30 namespaces with thousands of classes. These all work together to provide the developer with nearly every bit of functionality available through the user interface. SharePoint's web services have progressed quite a lot since the 2003 version of WSS. Gone are the ugly CAML statements of the previous version, replaced by 20 fully functional ASP.Net 2.0-based web services. Combine these powerful APIs with the newly enhanced SharePoint event system to create richly functional and extremely responsive applications.

This chapter began an examination of the SharePoint object model by looking at the highly comprehensive Microsoft.SharePoint namespace. Using this namespace, sample code was presented that creates a new SharePoint site, a new list in that site, and new list items in that list. Event handling, a subset of the functionality presented by the object model, was explored next with a sample Feature that prevents the deletion of items from a SharePoint Announcements list. The final API explored in this chapter was the web services layer. The sample application presented here used the Users and Groups web service to automatically place new users into SharePoint security groups. The chapter concluded with a brief overview of the decision points between writing object model code and web services code.