SharePoint 2010 Development – A Beginners Guide Part One

SharePoint 2010 Development – Getting Started

Well well well, look what’s happened, I have spent quite some time threatening to get into SharePoint Development and a few weeks ago I decided I would make some effort to get things going and with that in mind, of course, I wanted to share my thoughts and my journey.

I welcome posts from any devs expanding on some of the topics I might bring up or even correcting things I have done wrong, as after all, this is how I will learn and it will help anyone reading these posts.

With that said, let’s start the series by taking a quick look at what you might need before getting started.

Visual Studio 2010

One of the first things you will need to start developing SharePoint solutions is Microsoft’s IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of choice, Microsoft Visual Studio and this comes in various flavours from Professional to Test Professional and whilst some people still swear by notepad or notepad++, Visual Studio Premium is the version I will use in my examples.

You may also want to consider having SharePoint Designer 2010 installed as well as InfoPath and even Visio to help with some other tasks although I doubt these are essential and certainly not for this series.

SharePoint SDK

One of the things that is a great help to have installed is the SharePoint SDK (Software Development Kit).

The SharePoint SDK provides you with a wealth of information that is searchable without having to go Google it.

So that’s the development side of things but of course we need some kind of environment to work with.

Virtual Machine

If you are not sure what a virtual machine is then go and check out VMWare (specifically VMWare Player because it’s free or Workstation).

However, VMWare is the software that will enable you to create your own virtual machines but if you don’t want to go to the hassle of setting up SharePoint and everything else you need then you can always try the Microsoft Information Worker Demo VM which not only gives you a pre populated SharePoint environment but also all the software that i previously mentioned and lots lots more just bare in mind that this is a Hyper-V image (although it could be converted shhhhh!). This is a 180 day evaluation machine and correct me if I am wrong but that gives you 6 months to get to grips with this stuff.

So we have a Virtual Machine and the required software, now what?

In the next part of this series we will create our first Visual Studio Project and by the end of that post you will have created your first SharePoint Web Part? Excited? You should be!

Thanks

Matthew Hughes

About Matthew Hughes

Matthew Hughes has written 56 post in this blog.

I am a SharePoint Developer for UK based Intelligent Decisioning Ltd. Check us out id-live.com I setup SharePoint 365 as I saw that there was a need for introductory blog posts and knew there were some fantastic authors out there who might not have time to run their own blogs and keep them updated reguarly.

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