Introduction to Sharepoint 2013 : THE PLATFORM

SharePoint maintains a high-level architecture that is made up of a number of components (see Figure 1). You first install the core software on Windows so you can create SharePoint farms. A SharePoint farm is, in essence, one or more servers that make up your SharePoint instance. As a developer you should understand the three-tiered structure and roles of the SharePoint farm architecture, which includes a Web server role (a fast, load-balanced, lightweight server that responds to user requests and loads Web pages), Application server role (which provides the service features for SharePoint such as Excel Services), and Database server role (which stores content and service data). Your apps may interact with any one or all of these server roles.

FIGURE 1

You can have a standalone server acting as the entire farm (for example, all the components listed in Figure 1 installed or working on one machine). For testing and light workloads, this configuration might be adequate, depending on the hardware specifications. For larger organizational deployments, inclusive of failover and redundancy, a one-server farm is not adequate. However, the Windows operating system is your underlying install base — specifically, Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2012. SharePoint heavily leverages SQL Server as its underlying content database and ASP.NET/IIS as the application service server. You can then install either SharePoint Foundation (the free version) or SharePoint Server (which is loaded with enterprise-grade features), on top of which you would build and install your customizations. Or, as an alternative to installing SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Server, you can sign up for Office 365, which provisions and manages the underlying infrastructure for you but still gives you the power of programmability.

SharePoint Installation Types

When you install SharePoint, you can choose different types of deployments and installation types. There are three main ways to install and use SharePoint.

SharePoint Foundation

SharePoint Foundation ships as a free, downloadable install and represents the foundational parts of SharePoint. It includes a number of features such as security and administration, user and Team site collaboration, and a number of apps (such as document libraries and lists). In essence, it provides a baseline set of features that enable you to get started with both using and developing for SharePoint.

Although the functionality that ships in SharePoint Foundation is less broad than that which ships in SharePoint Server, downloading and installing SharePoint Foundation costs you nothing. You can get up and running very quickly with this version and begin your development work using it. In SharePoint 2013, though, you also have the ability to create SharePoint Online sites very quickly — and have a rich development model there as well.

SharePoint Server

SharePoint Server offers a wealth of features that extend upon those offered in SharePoint Foundation. These features include additional app types, Office server-side services such as Word and Excel Services, enhanced search versions, enhanced BI, and much more.

The following list provides a sampling of some of the services available in SharePoint Server:

• Access Services: Allows creation of new Access service applications using the Access 2013 Preview client. View, edit, and interact with Access Services databases in a browser.
• Access Services 2010: Allows continued maintenance of SharePoint 2010 Access service applications by using Access 2010 clients and Access 2013 Preview clients. Does not allow users to create new applications.
• App Management Service: Allows you to install apps from the internal app catalog or the public SharePoint store.
• Business Data Connectivity: Access line-of-business data systems.
• Excel Services: View and interact with Excel files in a browser.
• Machine Translation Service: Performs automated machine translation.
• Managed Metadata Service: Access managed taxonomy hierarchies, keywords, and social tagging infrastructure as well as content type publishing across site collections.
• PerformancePoint: Provides the capabilities of PerformancePoint Services.
• PowerPoint Conversion: Converts PowerPoint presentations to various formats.
• Search: Crawls and indexes content and serves search queries.
• Secure Store Service: Provides single sign-on authentication to access multiple applications or services.
• State Service: Provides temporary storage of user session data for SharePoint Server components.
• Usage and Health Data Collection: Collects farm-wide usage and health data and provides the ability to view various usage and health reports.
• User Profile: Adds support for My Sites, profile pages, social tagging, and other social computing features.
• Visio Graphics Service: Views and refreshes published Microsoft Visio diagrams in a Web browser.
• Word Automation Services: Performs automated bulk document conversions.
• Work Management: Provides task aggregation across work management systems, including Microsoft SharePoint Products, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft Project Server.
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service: Tracks subscription IDs and settings for services that are deployed in partitioned mode. Windows PowerShell only.

You can also choose to purchase the Internet-specific edition, SharePoint for Internet Sites, which provides rich publishing templates and workflow that you can use to create and deploy SharePoint sites to the wider Web (for example, building a scalable SharePoint site for public, anonymous access).

Office 365

Office 365 has emerged as a third, fully cloud-hosted model for SharePoint — as opposed to hosting your own farm in your own on-premises Data Center. It has also become a great place where you can develop rich applications (both as SharePoint-hosted and cloud-hosted apps) and scale without the cost of managing the on-premises infrastructure. It doesn’t have all the same services and features as SharePoint Server, but does carry with it some great development capabilities.

As a developer, you have the capability to customize any of the SharePoint editions, whether it’s SharePoint Foundation, Server, or Office 365. For example, beyond thematic or branding customizations, you can also develop and deploy custom solutions to each of these SharePoint versions. There are .NET applications that you build using C# or Visual Basic and then deploy into SharePoint as .WSPs or .APPs, or there are lighter-weight apps such as HTML5 and JavaScript apps that you can also deploy.

SharePoint 2013 Capabilities

A default set of capabilities (or features) is built into SharePoint that enables you to take advantage of the platform without doing any development. You can also use or extend these core capabilities when building your apps. Microsoft has historically referred to these capabilities as workloads. These workloads provide a way to talk about the different capabilities of SharePoint coming together, and you should see these workloads as not only representing a core set of related applications but also as opportunities for your application development.

For those who are experienced SharePoint developers, you’ll remember that Microsoft described the core capabilities for the SharePoint through workloads (seen in many 100-level presentations on SharePoint). In SharePoint 2010, these workloads were:

• Sites: Representing the different types of sites available for use and the features within these sites
• Communities: Representing the community and social features such as blogs and wikis
• Content: Representing core enterprise content management features
• Search: Representing the search-driven features
• Insights: Representing business intelligence features such as KPIs
• Composites: Representing the ability to integrate external applications by using, for example, Business Connectivity Services

These previous workloads have not gone away in SharePoint 2013; moreover, Microsoft has extended them to add more features and provide tighter integration.

Table 1 lists a sampling of the core capabilities for SharePoint 2013. Those of you who are experienced developers will see a lot of familiar areas because a lot of what you had in SharePoint 2010 is still available in SharePoint 2013, with a number of added areas. For example, note from the services listed previously in the “SharePoint Installation Types” section that Machine Translation Service, Access Services, App Management Service, and Work Management Service are new to SharePoint 2013. Furthermore, rather than Office Web Apps being a service, it is now a separate server product — which for IT pros will impact the design of your SharePoint farm topology. Also, what was FAST search in 2010 as a separate server product has been subsumed within SharePoint 2013 — which is fantastic because it improves the search experience immensely in this release. The whole movement to the cloud in general is a major shift in the way of thinking about SharePoint development; it is simultaneously exciting and challenging as developers need to think about app design and deployment in different ways than before.

TABLE 1: Sample SharePoint Capabilities

Each of the example capabilities in Table 1 offers many different development opportunities.

You will discover many more ways to develop for SharePoint as your journey deepens and you become more familiar with all the different facets of the SharePoint capabilities.

Site Collections and Sites

The site is the core artifact to SharePoint and represents the starting point for developers; that is, you can’t start developing until you have created a site collection. A variety of site templates are available for you to use. Figure 2 shows a selection of default templates from which you can choose when creating a new site collection. This example includes some of the choices available for creating a new site collection within an Office 365 instance, but a similar set of templates are available within SharePoint Foundation and Server. The ones in Figure 2 are only a subset of those available. To view the other ones, when creating a new site collection in the new site collection dialog click the Meetings, Enterprise, Publishing, or Custom tabs to see more. Each of these tabs contains specific templates that you can use for those purposes — for example, managing meetings, blogs, short-term document workspaces, longer-term projects, and, of course, building custom templates.

FIGURE 2

Because you need a SharePoint site as a starting point, let’s first go ahead and create a SharePoint site. This exercise assumes you have an Office 365 tenancy up and running. At the time of writing, you could go to: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en and click the Try button, and then under the Enterprise category click Try. You’ll then be guided through a short wizard to provision an Office 365 instance.

TRY IT OUT: Creating Your First SharePoint Site

To create a simple Team site within your Office 365 instance:

1. Navigate to the administration portal of your Office 365 portal: https://portal.microsoftonline.com/admin/default.aspx. Enter your Office 365 user ID (for example, [email protected]) and a password.

2. Click the Admin drop-down list and select SharePoint, which opens the SharePoint Administrator Center, (see Figure 3).

FIGURE 3

3. In the SharePoint Administration Center, click Site Collections — located on the left side of the screen.

4. Under the Site Collections tab, select New and then click Private Site Collection as shown in Figure 4.

FIGURE 4

5. In the new site collection dialog (shown in Figure 5), provide a Title and a Public Website Address, select a Template (for this example choose the Developer Site under the Collaboration tab), leave the Time Zone to the default setting, add yourself as the Administrator, and provide a Storage Quota and Server Resource Quota.

FIGURE 5

6. Click OK.

7. Wait a couple of minutes while Office 365 provisions the new site using the Developer Site template. When it’s done, click the link to your new site, shown in Figure 6: https://mydomain.sharepoint.com/sites/dev.

FIGURE 6

The new site should look similar to Figure 6. Go ahead and explore the site. You can click the live tiles at the top of the site, click the links on the left-hand side of the site, add subsites to this site collection, and so on.

How It Works

The baseline artifact that you created here was a site collection. The site collection in this case was a developer-specific site and represents the uppermost root site that you’ll work from within SharePoint. You can now add default apps (such as lists or document libraries), create and deploy Apps for SharePoint, configure the look and feel of the site, and so on.

The site collection is a site that you can customize and interact with. You grow your SharePoint site collection by adding additional Websites to it. Any site you create underneath the site collection is called a subsite. This might seem confusing, but just think of the site collection being the parent and the sites within that collection being the children. This is important because by default children sites inherit the parent site’s properties (such as permissions).

Creating the site collection is the most fundamental development task within SharePoint; once you’ve completed this, you’re ready to begin building apps. To do so, it helps to understand the types of APIs that are available to you.

SharePoint 2013 APIs

After you create a new site collection, you now have the fundamental parent object in place to begin coding against. As a developer, you’ll want to understand what you can do with this site now that it’s created. This requires a baseline understanding of the available APIs and services. You’ll want to be most familiar with two sets of object model levels: the server object model and the client-side object model.

Server Object Model

The server object model is reserved for full-instance SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Server installations. You essentially have carte blanche access to the server when you install and host it yourself. It is also the broadest of the available APIs within the managed SharePoint classes. You can build many different types of applications using the server object model for tasks such as document library or list creation or manipulation, retrieving user information, site administration, backup, taxonomy and metadata management, and so on. The bulk of the server object model classes are available in the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace.

The server object model is available through a set of assemblies that are deployed to the global assembly cache (GAC), so you must deploy apps on the server for them to use these classes and libraries. However, you can do quite a lot with them. For example, the following code snippet sets the title and description for a list called Tasks and then calls the Update method to update the changes:

SPList myTaskList = mySPTaskSite.Lists["Tasks"];
myTaskList.Title="Sales Task List";
myTaskList.Description="A list of sales tasks.";
myTaskList.Update();

Client-side Object Model

The client-side object model is also available for your use in remote or client-side applications. These applications could be .NET, Silverlight, or one of the new additions to SharePoint 2013, the mobile API. This is significant because it provides you with the ability to create and deploy apps that are not necessarily dependent on server-side resources. For example, the following code snippet shows a sampling of SharePoint client-side code. You can see right away that the client-side object model looks somewhat different; in this snippet, you’re setting the context for your SharePoint site, loading it, and then calling the ExecuteQuery() method — which executes everything that has been set before that line of code (think of a more optimized, batch processing approach). The final line of code sets the Text property of the lblSPLabel object (a label) to be the title of the SharePoint site.

ClientContext context = new ClientContext("http://MySharePointSite"); 
Web web = context.Web;  
context.Load(web); 
context.ExecuteQuery();
lblSPLabel.Text = web.Title;

JavaScript Object Model

SharePoint 2013 also has a JavaScript object model. This is an extension to what is available in the client-side object model and provides an opportunity for you to build a broad variety of SharePoint-hosted apps that can further integrate with HTML5, JQuery, and other Web technologies.

Moving Beyond the Models

Beyond the server object model and client-side object model, many other ways exist that you can build applications and solutions for SharePoint. For example, you can use a rich set of OData and REST (Representational State Transfer) services to interact with SharePoint data. Note also that the client-side object model has many REST counterparts to ensure you have multiple ways to build your Web apps. The REST services within SharePoint support both Atom and JSON formats.

Within each SharePoint site that you create, you’re going to find many different opportunities to create and program against data. In the world of SharePoint, data can mean many different things, such as:

• Integrating with Access Services
• Interacting with SQL Server data
• Interacting with service endpoints through BDC to integrate with LOB and non-Microsoft systems
• Leveraging SQL Server Reporting Services or PerformancePoint Server to bring enhanced BI into your solutions
• Coding against data that might come from a SharePoint list where users manually enter the list data, and you programmatically code against it

To help with data programmability, you can use both the server- and client-side object models, but WCF Data Services are also supported within SharePoint. This enables you to interact with data through a LINQ provider and use LINQ syntax in .NET or Silverlight applications. For example, you can target both listdata.svc for list data or client.svc for accessing SharePoint entities beyond list data.

The preceding APIs represent a core set of ways in which you can program against SharePoint — from the fully self-hosted server instance to the cloud-hosted Office 365. Beyond these core APIs and services, you’ll find you can programmatically interact with many of the services that ship with SharePoint Foundation or Server. You’ll also find that you can build and deploy cloud-hosted apps (whether to Windows Azure or to other domains or Web technologies).

Many of you who will develop for SharePoint may also administer certain aspects of your SharePoint site. This might mean that you have to install and configure SharePoint, understand how to upgrade some of your solutions from SharePoint 2010 to 2013, or even create new Web applications or sites using the Central Administration site functions. Because cases may occur where you want to leverage the capabilities built into SharePoint Central Administration, the following section provides an overview of interacting with SharePoint 2013 in this manner.