Download Guide for SharePoint Online Development
Microsoft has made available a guide for developers for your SharePoint Online development.
This guide walks you through some of the rich features in SharePoint Online that are available to developers and designers. It provides an overview of the feature set and extensibility points for SharePoint Online, and a discussion of how to create solutions for this new environment. This guide begins by describing the types of solutions you can build, and then addresses the developer tools for SharePoint 2010, the new platform features, and the solution deployment architecture.
SharePoint Online opens a new arena for developers to create solutions for customers who use the Microsoft Office 365 service instead of maintaining on-premises servers, or for clients who are looking to take advantage of hybrid deployments where some data is stored behind the firewall and other data is off-loaded in the cloud.
About SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service, hosted by Microsoft, for businesses of all sizes. Instead of installing and deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on premises, any business can now simply subscribe to SharePoint Online to provide their employees with an enterprise-grade solution for creating sites to share documents and information with colleagues and customers.
SharePoint Online provides a solid business collaboration platform on for you to build solutions rapidly by using familiar development tools. In addition to in-browser customizations, SharePoint Online supports development with Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. SharePoint Online enables you to modify sites directly and deploy code as sandboxed solutions that are run in a protected environment to safeguard the environment from poorly performing or malicious code.
Rich Platform Services
SharePoint Online includes many new capabilities and features for developers. The following describes the rich platform services that you can use in your application on SharePoint Online.
Sandboxed solutions
A sandboxed solution is deployed at the site collection level by using the SharePoint solution gallery, and it cannot access data outside of the site collection in which it was deployed. In addition, a sandboxed solution cannot invoke certain security-related functionality, such as running with elevated privileges. All of these restrictions are put in place to ensure that malicious or poorly performing code cannot adversely affect the SharePoint Online environment. As a result, site collection administrators can feel confident about uploading and activating a sandboxed solution.
SharePoint Online supports the deployment of sandboxed solutions that restricts the operations that your code can perform, and also provides a monitoring environment to verify that code does not adversely impact other sites.
Note: Developing a sandboxed solution is the only way you can upload and run custom code in SharePoint Online.
SharePoint Server ribbon
The SharePoint Server ribbon provides a consistent user interface for working with SharePoint objects. The ribbon includes tabs and controls that appear at the top of the browser interface, providing a consistent location to perform tasks for users of your SharePoint site.
SharePoint dialog boxes
SharePoint provides a dialog box platform that enables modal dialog boxes to be included in custom solutions that fit in with the style of a SharePoint page. By using dialog boxes, users are encouraged to focus on the information that is presented to them, and then interact with and close the dialog box before continuing to work with the site. Dialog boxes enable the creation of responsive user interfaces so that users can complete data entry boxes from the pop-up dialog box on the existing page, instead of having to navigate to a new page to complete the data entry task. In many cases, they improve performance by reducing the number of page requests and round trips to the server.
Silverlight Web Part
SharePoint 2010 provides a Silverlight Web Part that you can use to easily add a Silverlight application to a page in your site. You can upload a Silverlight application to a library in your SharePoint site and then configure the Silverlight Web Part to load your Silverlight application.
List lookups and relationships
SharePoint 2010 enables you to create relationships between lists in your SharePoint site collection. For example, you can specify that the column for a list can take values that exist only in another list elsewhere on the site. Using a defined lookup, you can use join statements in Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) or LINQ to SharePoint to query across lists.
LINQ to SharePoint
SharePoint 2010 includes the LINQ to SharePoint provider, which translates LINQ statements to CAML queries. LINQ is a standard query language and, when applied to SharePoint, it enables developers to query SharePoint lists without requiring them to learn the CAML syntax that is used internally by SharePoint.
Event enhancements
SharePoint 2010 provides new events that you can use when developing applications for your SharePoint site. Events enable you to intercept an action and run code either pre-event or post-event, as part of a sandboxed solution.
Workflow enhancements
In SharePoint 2010, you can associate workflows with the site and with a particular list. This enables you to create workflows that affect multiple lists or start workflows that do not affect lists.
Workflows also support new events that enable complex business processes to be chained together in a modular, manageable way.
Note: You can develop code for workflow events only in sandboxed solutions.
Client object model
The client object model is a client-side set of technologies that exposes SharePoint 2010 server-side objects and data on client computers. By using the client object model, you can develop applications that run on the client computer through familiar development concepts, such as objects, properties, events, and methods.
REST APIs
SharePoint 2010 provides access to server data through the Representational State Transfer (REST) API. By using REST, lists and list items are represented as HTTP resources that can be addressed by remote URLs.
Getting Started with SharePoint Online
Follow the guidance in the Guide for SharePoint Online Development. The development is similar to that for on-premises SharePoint. You can build and test your applications on Windows 7. Server-side code must run in the sandbox. Clients including those using JavaScript, .NET, and Silverlight can take advantage of the client object model.
So the development environment and deployment in WSP files is the same as for SharePoint 2010. You can get started today.
You can get started at the SharePoint Development Center on MSDN. You will find the SharePoint Developer Training Kit, online videos, and advanced training.
Get the guide for developers for your SharePoint Online. And choose those features in SharePoint 2010 that are supported online. And you’re set.
Also, SharePoint Conference registration is now open.
Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation