I’m in the middle of a talk about .NET programmability of SharePoint while I write this quick post.
My first impression on the next version of SharePoint? Microsoft wants developers to stop creating pure ASP.NET to create corporate websites. ASP.NET will remain, of course, but as a lower-level tool in the abstraction ladder. You can do pure ASP.NET applicaitons, of course, but do not spend time using it for your classic everyday Intranet site! For that, you’ve got everything out of the box with SharePoint v3 (out with Vista, later this year).
The abstraction level of SharePoint is higher, and it provides a basic programmable framework that gives everything you need to create a website providing the following:
- Enterprise Document Management with versioning, metadata, security, etc
- Blogs, wiki, item lists…
- Workflows of any kind (like document validation or workgroup collaboration)
- Integration with Office, from Excel to Outlook to InfoPath…
- Timed server-side jobs
- So many things that I could spend a whole day typing…
SharePoint v3 provides all these functionality out-of-the-box, and I know by experience that much of these features have been coded once and again by developers everywhere; so, the idea is simple: stop coding, start configuring and using.