SharePoint Development Blog by Jeremy Thake - FACT: You can’t be a SharePoint Developer unless…

Welcome to my blog on all things SharePoint. I have a range of articles that will interest you if you've made it as far as visiting my blog. I was awarded as an SharePoint MVP by Microsoft in July 2010. I currently live in New York and am an Enterprise Architect at AvePoint Inc.. I co founded www.NothingButSharePoint.com with Mark Miller in 2010.

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Whitepapers

NBSP

Check out my articles on NothingButSharePoint.com

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

This series was inspired by the chatter amongst SharePoint blogs on the best ways to approach customisations in SharePoint using Solutions.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8

Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

This series was inspired by a discussion had with Andrew Coates at a Perth SharePoint User Group meeting. This then turned into a 6 part series on Arno Nell's SharePointMagazine.net web site.

Initial post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

Webcasts

I have recorded various web casts that I present at User Groups or just on a specific topic by request:
How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast
SPSource Webcast: Reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates and much more
SharePoint Development with Unit Testing webcast
Perth SharePoint UG Web Cast on approaches to deploying artefacts (SPSource)
More...

Podcasts

I have been interviewed about Leveraging the SharePoint Platform by the SharePoint Pod Show: listen here .

Feed your read!

FACT: You can’t be a SharePoint Developer unless…

Tags: SharePoint
Technorati Tags: SharePoint

I’ve just been on a training course and was shocked to find out that some of the Developers hadn’t heard of various SharePoint Resources online, including the SharePointDevWiki.com . I know, I know! Where have they been since December last year! LOL

Seriously, it wasn’t so much the wiki, as I know that it is only promoted in various inner circles and not as mainstream as MSDN as a resource. I will say though, that I really appreciate the continued support from the community in promoting and contributing to the wiki and am extremely pleased with its progress in the 6 months it has been online!

“I didn’t know about that”

What did surprise me is that some seemed to give blank looks when the Patterns & Practices material available on CodePlex was mentioned and I daren’t even ask about whether they knew the issues with disposing of objects.

“Who’s that?”

How has this come about…well they aren’t the first SharePoint Developers I’m come across like this. Often at the local Perth SharePoint User Group, you’ll mention things that you just assume people know because they are as stir-crazy as yourself and read the main stream SharePoint Blogs. This is an incorrect assumption. Sometimes I’ll even mention names like Andrew Connell, Joel Oleson, Spencer Harbar, Bob Fox, Todd Klindt, Rob Bogue, Todd Baginski, etc. and they’ll give me that look as if they’ve never heard the names. For me, without keeping up with these guys you’ll just simply miss so many things to make your life as a SharePoint Developer infinitely easier!

“Not everyones like you”

I understand for some SharePoint Development is simply a day job, and my girlfriend reminds me on lots of occasions that “not everyone is like you…it’s just a job to them” and “I bet they don’t fall to sleep with a SharePoint text book on their nose”. Developers simply don’t get time to sit and read through all the resources that are updated regularly online.

I am extremely passionate about SharePoint, a lot of my ASP.NET Readify colleagues ask me “why?” and my answer is: “SharePoint is a challenge, no one will ever conquer it! I love the daily challenges and the excitement of overcoming it and learning new things.”.

I take a lot of pride in my work and i just don’t think I’d be half the SharePoint Developer I would be if I didn’t read the blogs I do, listen to the podcasts I do, watch the webcasts I do and debate with the other guys at User Groups that I do.

SharePoint Developers – It’s not just about buying a book!

One thing I have realised is that often teams just buy the books off the shelf. Now these are great, but by the time they are published they are almost 6 months behind. 6 months in SharePoint World is a long bloody time! SPDisposeChecker wasn’t even released to the public at that stage, VSeWSS 1.3 CTP wasn’t even released, SPSource wasn’t released (plug)…and that’s just the tools that wouldn’t have been mentioned in books.

So for those Developers out there not leveraging the resources out there…please try and find time to at least be aware of what a DataFormWebPart (Data View Web Part) is and stop cutting your own ones (borrowed from @imorrish), that SPDisposeChecker wil save your arse getting kicked when stuff goes to Production and sucks up all your RAM, that SPSource can save you hours of code cutting (plug) and that WSPBuilder can save you lifetimes!

I have discussed this quite frequently in terms of the amount of content out there and I believe whole-heartedly that the SharePointDevWIki.com can help set a baseline of resources and knowledge that SharePoint Developers should have as a minimum. I also believe it can give them a lot more too and that they can give a lot more back!
I have started a weekly update (I hope you have all noticed) promoting SharePoint Development news worth reading. I am hoping this will allow people to at the minimum check this out to keep up-to-date.

Development Managers – Raise the bar!

For Development Managers out there, I don’t see any harm in asking these kind of questions to ensure that they are at the correct level for your team. I’m sick of seeing other integrators code that won’t pass SPDisposeChecker, is deploying things manually to the 12Hive without wsp’s and overwriting out of the box 12 Hive files!

Please encourage Developers to attend User Groups and to also present at them. The SharePoint community is large and don’t think that what you are doing has been done a thousand times before…because it probably hasn’t!

Conclusion

So to answer the post title: “unless…they atleast digest the ‘Where to start with SharePoint Development’” which does include the Microsoft resources, but some other key areas that should be regularly checked.

Posted by Jeremy Thake on 5/22/2009
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Michael commented on Friday, May 22, 2009 8:24 PM

>>...Sometimes I’ll even mention names like .... and they’ll give me that look as if they’ve never heard the names

You should not follow these guys to be a good SharePoint developer. You just do you work and you can do it good without reading these guys. There is no reference between "being good developer" == "reading all Sharepoint fellows".
The other point is that SharePoint is not the whole world, it just very small part if IT. there are huge number of things outsite sharepoint and event outside MS technologies that are very interesting. People might not be so narrow-minded only in SharePoint, that's why these names say nothing to them :)

Michael commented on Friday, May 22, 2009 8:26 PM

I'd rephrase - you can't be a good developer if you are only interesting in SharePoint :)

Jeremy Thake commented on Friday, May 22, 2009 9:33 PM

It's a very valid point...although the title of the blog post does scope the solution for "SharePoint Developers". I do agree though that as SharePoint is on top of the ASP.NET 2.0 stack, you need to know your way around ASP.NET. But with all the articles out there you can get a way with following the bouncy ball...
You just need to be sure you don't follow some of the bouncy balls that don't take into account things like WSPs, SPDisposeChecker etc.
It's on my radar that the wiki does focus on SharePoint whole heartedly and that we probably need to highlight some relevant sections on ASP.NET such as web.config, user controls, logging and then general .NET framework stuff like enums, struts, generics, linq etc. But then we'd be overlapping with other great resources too!

Michael commented on Friday, May 22, 2009 10:47 PM

So, that's why I think that there is no pure "SharePoint developers" at all :) It's just API on the top of ASP.NET, nothing else. There are huge efforts to be SharePoint Architect, and Admin, because it implies knowledge of the whole platform, but everybody who uses ASP.NET can be SharePoint developer :) and I see no point in concentrating in SP dev :)

Jeremy Thake commented on Saturday, May 23, 2009 7:22 PM

You think "everyone who uses ASP.NET" can be a SharePoint Developer...I think that is an extremely dangerous assumption to make! SharePoint is an enormous platform, and it is no walk in the park to get an ASP.NET developer up to speed!

Michael commented on Saturday, May 23, 2009 10:56 PM

Michael commented on Saturday, May 23, 2009 11:01 PM

It's dangerous, if these persons are not guided by good SharePoint leads.
We tried this approach before and it works really nice. We used good asp.net devs who have never used SharePoint before and with small guidance over SharePoint API they made really good progress and product was shipped in time

commented on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 4:00 AM

I've seen the opposite - SharePoint Dev's who don't really get ASP.NET - it's a bad place to be.

That said, the opposite isn't any better; if you're doing complicated stuff in SharePoint just having ASP.NET skills won't cut it. Sure, they can access the object model - but deployment, virtual file systems, CAML, all that feature stuff, etc. is nothing like ASP.NET