INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK IS FOR ANYONE INTERESTED in developing applications on top of SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint Online in Office 365. Although some knowledge is assumed about SharePoint, you will find the examples comprehensive and easy to follow if you have previous knowledge of web development and development tools.

WHAT THIS BOOK COVERS

SharePoint 2010 is a big product and this book is a big, diverse book. So, before you dive into the book, we wanted to give you a little feel for what each chapter entails and what you can expect once you have read the chapter.

Introductory Chapters

The first couple of chapters provide an introduction to SharePoint 2010, since the 2010 release is a large release across all the many SharePoint workloads. In these chapters, you develop an understanding of the features that 2010 provides, from creating collaboration sites to managing your content.

From there, you will explore the new developer tools in Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint. With the 2010 release of Visual Studio, Microsoft has invested in making Visual Studio a first-class SharePoint development tool with new development, debugging, and testing tools targeted specifically at SharePoint 2010.

Finally, you will see the IT professional improvements for developers. These improvements make deploying and debugging with your IT counterparts faster and easier.

Platform Services

The next section of the book is about the base platform services and APIs provided by SharePoint. This is a big section since SharePoint is a big product with a lot of platform services. This section also serves as a basis for the rest of the book when it comes to the APIs and protocols that you will use to develop with SharePoint.

Workload Chapters

The majority of the book focuses on the workload services and platform provided by SharePoint. This includes social networking, content management, search, forms, and business intelligence. This section of the book is where you can learn to build applications that extend the built-in workloads of SharePoint and shape them to perform the functionality you need to solve your business problems.

Online Services

The last section introduces you to moving your applications to Microsoft's cloud services, called Microsoft Online Services. Through these cloud services, specifically Microsoft SharePoint Online, you can start hosting and sharing your application in the cloud with coworkers or business partners without having to run the IT infrastructure yourself. With Office 365, SharePoint 2010 comes to the cloud and allows you to integrate your SharePoint environment with other environments such as Windows Azure.

HOW THIS BOOK IS STRUCTURED

This book is structured to build logically on the skills you learn as you progress through it. After the initial introduction and base platform chapters, the book moves into the more advanced part of the platform. Each chapter builds on knowledge acquired from earlier in the book, so you will want to read through the chapters in succession or at the very least read the introduction and platform chapters before reading later chapters in the book.

WHAT YOU NEED TO USE THIS BOOK

First, you will need a copy of SharePoint 2010. The book is written to the public beta of SharePoint 2010, so you will want to download the beta. We have done our best to test against the released version of SharePoint, so please check the Wrox site regularly to see if there are updated code samples available.

Besides SharePoint 2010, you will need Visual Studio 2010 and Office 2010. The easiest way to get all these products is to download the pre-build virtual machine, which includes these products that Microsoft will release after the RTM of SharePoint 2010.

CONVENTIONS

To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what's happening, we've used a number of conventions throughout the book.

As for styles in the text:

• New terms and important words are italicized when introduced.
• Keyboard strokes are shown like this: Ctrl+A.
• Filenames, URLs, and code within the text looks like this: persistence.properties.
• Code is presented in two different ways:

  We use a monofont type with no highlighting for most code examples. We use bold to emphasize code that is particularly important in the present context or to show changes from a previous code snippet.

SOURCE CODE

As you work through the examples in this book, you may choose either to type in all the code manually, or to use the source code files that accompany the book. All the source code used in this book is available for download at www.wrox.com. When at the site, simply locate the book's title (use the Search box or one of the title lists) and click the Download Code link on the book's detail page to obtain all the source code for the book. Code that is included on the website is highlighted by the following icon:

Listings include the filename in the title. If it is just a code snippet, you'll find the filename in a code note such as this:

Once you download the code, just decompress it with your favorite compression tool. Alternately, you can go to the main Wrox code download page at www.wrox.com/dynamic/books/download.aspx to see the code available for this book and all other Wrox books.

ERRATA

Every effort is made to ensure that there are no errors in the text or in the code. However, no one is perfect, and mistakes do occur. If you find an error in one of our books, like a spelling mistake or faulty piece of code, your feedback is welcome. By sending in errata, you may save another reader hours of frustration and at the same time you will be helping us provide even higher quality information.

To find the errata page for this book, go to www.wrox.com and locate the title using the Search box or one of the title lists. Then, on the book's detail page, click the Book Errata link. On this page, you can view all errata that has been submitted for this book and posted by Wrox editors. A complete book list including links to each book's errata is also available at www.wrox.com/misc-pages/booklist.shtml.

If you don't spot “your” error on the Book Errata page, go to www.wrox.com/contact/techsupport.shtml and complete the form there to send us the error you have found. Once the information is checked, a message is posted to the book's errata page and the problem is fixed in subsequent editions of the book.

P2P.WROX.COM

For author and peer discussion, join the P2P forums at p2p.wrox.com. The forums are a web-based system for you to post messages relating to Wrox books and related technologies, and interact with other readers and technology users. The forums offer a subscription feature to email you topics of interest of your choosing when new posts are made to the forums. Wrox authors, editors, other industry experts, and your fellow readers are present on these forums.

At p2p.wrox.com you will find a number of different forums that will help you not only as you read this book, but also as you develop your own applications. To join the forums, just follow these steps:

1. Go to p2p.wrox.com and click the Register link.
2. Read the terms of use and click Agree.
3. Complete the required information to join, as well as any optional information you want to provide, and click Submit.
4. You will receive an email with information describing how to verify your account and complete the joining process.

Once you join, you can post new messages and respond to messages other users post. You can read messages at any time on the web. If you would like to have new messages from a particular forum emailed to you, click the Subscribe to This Forum icon by the forum name in the forum listing.

For more information about how to use the Wrox P2P, be sure to read the P2P FAQs for answers to questions about how the forum software works, as well as many common questions specific to P2P and Wrox books. To read the FAQs, click the FAQ link on any P2P page.