Appendix

Additional Help and Resources

WHAT’S IN THIS APPENDIX?

• Discovering help and additional resources

Developing for SharePoint involves bringing together a number of technologies, including SharePoint, developer tools, and web development technologies. To be effective in developing for SharePoint, you need to understand the resources available to help you, both from Microsoft and from the community. There are high-quality tools and documentation available from both resources.

DOWNLOADABLE HELP FILES FROM MICROSOFT

The key resource from Microsoft that every SharePoint developer should download is the SharePoint SDK. The SDK comes in two versions, one for SharePoint Foundation and another for SharePoint Server. You should download both sets of SDKs onto your development machine.

ONLINE HELP FROM MICROSOFT

You can find one of the key resources available online for learning what’s new in SharePoint 2013 for developers at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163091.aspx.

In addition to the What’s New site, you can look at a number of other resources, including the SharePoint 2013 training for developers at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/fp123633.aspx.

Another key resource to keep track of is the SharePoint team blog. On this blog, the SharePoint team posts relevant information about SharePoint that customers and partners would be interested in. The blog is located at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/default.aspx.

The last resource is the SharePoint Developer Documentation team blog. This blog is the location where the developer documentation team posts important information that may not be in the SDK, or best practices for developing with SharePoint. You can find the blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdev/.

HELP FROM THE COMMUNITY

SharePoint has a rich community that develops community-driven tools. For example, http://apps.codeplex.com/ is a CodePlex project where developers can contribute and share their apps for SharePoint with others in the community. In addition, there are a number of other online resources that you should review as you develop your SharePoint solutions. The following list shows some of the sites that might help you with your SharePoint development.

• Reza Alirezaei’s blog: http://blogs.devhorizon.com/reza
• Scot Hillier’s blog: http://www.shillier.com/default.aspx
• Amit Vasu’s blog: http://www.amitvasu.com/Blog/default.aspx
• Andrew Connell’s blog: www.andrewconnell.com/blog/
• Joel Oleson’s SharePoint blog: www.sharepointjoel.com/default.aspx
• Eli Robillard’s blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/erobillard/
• Noorez Khamis’s blog: http://www.khamis.net/blog/default.aspx
• CodePlex: www.codeplex.com/
• Steve Peschka’s blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/