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SharePoint 2013: Sandboxed Solutions are deprecated

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Microsoft in 16 July 2012 published many articles on MSDN, and said that Sandboxed Solutions are deprecated in SharePoint 2013, I really wanted to post about it but thought I should wait for sometime..

Till I found Andrew Connell post http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2012/07/16/understanding-sharepoint-2013-apps-aka-apps-101.aspx and in the comments as I was reading, I realized that it was good to wait as Microsoft changes lots of things from Consumer Preview edition to Beta 1 to Beta 2 if there will be 2 to RTM and so on…

But there is no bug because it is really deprecated.

Then another post from elumenotion Blog http://www.elumenotion.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=158 thay says:

Microsoft is deprecating Sandboxed Solutions in SharePoint 2013

This means that the functionality will still be available for use in SharePoint 2013, but primarily for backwards compatibility with existing solutions built using the sandbox solution approach.

Microsoft's guidance is that if you are building new applications that in the past you would have deployed as sandbox solutions, you should use the new App model for those solutions instead of using sandbox solutions.

They took a similar approach in SharePoint 2010 with the STSADM command line administration tool when it was deprecated in favor of the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and the numerous PowerShell cmdlets deployed with that tool. STSADM is still available in SharePoint 2010, but mainly just to allow for older scripts and tools that use STSADM to still function with SharePoint 2010.

The issue was brought to the product team and they said that the text in some of the documentation did not clearly represent their position on sandboxed solutions. The documentation has since been changed to state: **SharePoint sandboxed solutions are deprecated in SharePoint 2013 Preview in favor of developing apps for SharePoint. **My interpretation of this is: we (Microsoft) feel that Apps can do what sandboxed solutions can do and we feel that the future of development on the SharePoint platform are Apps so we suggest you stop using sandboxed solutions.

So, are sandboxed solutions still supported in SharePoint 2013? Yes they are. What about the next version of SharePoint? Maybe, it depends on whether the App model is all it’s cracked up to be. It’s still too early to call.