Foreword

Ted Pattison’s arrival on the SharePoint technology scene back in 2004 marked a particularly nice milestone: A popular developer trainer with serious .NET development credentials realized the developer potential of Windows SharePoint Services. Ted started writing about developing with SharePoint products and technologies in his MSDN Magazine column. He developed training materials. He taught classes. He delivered high-quality conference presentations. We noticed.

Ted was one of a handful of people we brought in to work with our engineering teams very, very early in the development of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to write preliminary white papers for early beta customers, all of which were turned into SDK articles. He developed and delivered training to customers and partners in our early adopter programs, and the experiences with training many, many developers along the way has given him particularly good insight as to what they want and what they need to learn to make use of SharePoint technology.

Most important, we don’t regard Ted as a “SharePoint developer.” Ted is a .NET developer who has figured out how to incorporate SharePoint technology into his repertoire of skills and tools. He knows when to make use of our technology and how to do so in a way that meshes with standard practices developers have come to adopt for .NET in general and ASP.NET in particular. His time spent training for DevelopMentor and his time spent since then at his own company established his skills both in explaining technology and translating that understanding into practical “hands-on” activity.

Together with Patrick Tisseghem (who has conveniently written a Microsoft Press book on developing with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007-the perfect companion to this book), with whom Ted frequently collaborates, you won’t find people who’ve spent more time thinking about, teaching courses about, and speaking about developing with SharePoint products and technologies.

Daniel Larson is the perfect coauthor for Ted, with a background to complement Ted’s. Dan has been involved with our technology going back five years, and blogs about developing with SharePoint technology on a regular basis. He spends time with our engineering team finding ways to incorporate the latest ASP.NET developments into the pages we serve up in SharePoint sites, and is passionate about Internet- and community-targeted technologies like RSS and OPML.

But more important than any of that is that Dan practices what he preaches. At NewsGator, he creates world-class portal applications using SharePoint products and technologies integrated with RSS, AJAX, and social computing. He’s seen what works and what doesn’t and has personally figured out how to get from pain to payoff when it comes to creating great products with SharePoint technology.

You’ll see a lot of valuable content in this book. It covers our Web user interface, our storage technology for documents and data, and our ready-to-use application facilities like workflow and content types. Most important, it advocates a style of organizing code projects that makes the task of writing, maintaining, deploying, and updating code a lot more productive.

When you develop for Windows SharePoint Services, you’re really creating extensions and assets to be used by a preexisting Web application. Ted and Dan have figured this out and have geared their examples and guidance to that reality. The results are great-happy reading!

Derek Burney

General Manager, Windows SharePoint Services

Microsoft Corporation