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SharePoint: Brave New World

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So I moved into a new assignment last week. After spending the last two years writing about programming Publisher, PowerPoint, and OneNote (and occasionally Visio), it's only logical that I would move on to writing about something that really plays to my experience programming Windows client applications:

Windows SharePoint Services.

Seriously, I’m very excited about digging into the SharePoint products and exploring all the cool things you can do with them. But I have to say, I'm also more than a little intimidated. Not just by having to learn a new product, and the (several) technologies that product is built on and interacts with. Even more than that, I suspect I'll have to learn an entire new way of looking at programming. Having experience exclusively in programming Windows client applications, switching over to an application built on and employing database, server, and web technologies is a sea change. Like it or not, my world is about to get a lot more complicated.

Which probably puts me in the same camp with a lot of Office developers out there. So I've decided to blog about it. As I ramp up on the SharePoint products and underlying technologies, I'll try and chart my progress here, sharing what I'm learning, listing the resources I've found helpful, expounding on the deep insights I have that are probably blazingly obvious to anyone with a web programming background.

With any luck, detailing my learning curve with SharePoint technologies here can be of use to other Office developers out there making the same transition.

Off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure I'll need to learn about the following technologies to various degrees, before even getting to the SharePoint products:

· Windows Server 2003

· SQL Server 2000

· ASP.NET

· XML services

· .NET programming

Stay tuned. It should be an interesting ride.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 11, 2005
    Good luck with it :) Sounds like a very good job to have.

    Don't be surprised if you end up knee deep in MCMS as well ;)
  • Anonymous
    January 11, 2005
    The comment has been removed