Hour 3. Starting Development with SharePoint 2010

What You’ll Learn in This Hour:

• Understanding SharePoint solutions as deployment units

• Introducing SharePoint features

• Debugging SharePoint solutions

Hour 1, “Introducing SharePoint 2010,” gave you an overview of SharePoint 2010, and Hour 2, “Understanding the SharePoint 2010 Architecture,” looked at SharePoint’s architecture. If you are the typical developer, by now you are probably anxious to write some code. In this hour you begin by writing code in SharePoint 2010 in the form of a console application. After that you learn about SharePoint features and solutions, and then write your first SharePoint feature. Finally you learn about debugging techniques in SharePoint and how they differ from a normal ASP.NET application.

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Try It Yourself: Write a Simple Console Application

You write your first SharePoint 2010 code in the form of a console application.

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By the Way

Although this is not a project type that you will use frequently, console applications are really useful when playing around with the SharePoint object model for learning purposes or to test some code quickly.

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Writing a console app is simple:

1. Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new Visual C# project of type Console Application as shown in Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1. New Project screen

2. Add a reference to the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll from the .NET tab. If you cannot find it there you will find it in the <14 hive>ISAPI folder.

3. Add the following using statement:

using Microsoft.SharePoint;

4. Add the following code inside the Main method:

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By the Way

You may need to replace http://splearn with the appropriate URL if the URL of your SharePoint site is different.

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using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://splearn"))
            {
                using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(web.Title);
                    Console.ReadKey();
                }
            }

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Watch Out!

Notice the using statements while creating the SPSite and SPWeb objects. It is important that you dispose these objects in any SharePoint application, or they will cause a memory leak and drastically impact the performance of your SharePoint application.

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5. If you try to run the program by pressing F5 or clicking on the Start Debugging button, the program throws an exception indicating the web application was not found.

6. This is because by default the platform for your project is x86 and your SharePoint application needs to run under a x64 platform. To change this go to your project properties and under the Build section change the platform to x64 or AnyCPU. In addition ensure that the Target Framework is set to .Net Framework 3.5 in the Application tab of the project properties.

7. Run the program again by pressing F5 or clicking the Start Debugging button. You should see the title of your site.

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You just wrote your first code and used two important objects of the SharePoint Object model that you will find yourself using almost everywhere. The SPSite represents a SharePoint site collection. The SPWeb represents a site within the site collection. In this case we are accessing the top level site by making a call to the OpenWeb() function of the SPSite. We could have also accessed the top level site by accessing the RootWeb property of the SPSite. However, it was important for you to see the OpenWeb() method and overload that you will be using to access the subsites method as well. Hour 7, “Understanding SharePoint 2010 Server Side Development,” discusses most objects of the SharePoint object model in detail. However, it is helpful to get acquainted with a few of the objects that you will use frequently. You might have observed that SPSite and SPWeb represent the site collection and the site in the SharePoint hierarchy that we looked at in Hour 2. Following are the other objects in the SharePoint hierarchy:

• SPFarm—This class represents a SharePoint farm and is a part of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace. You can access the local farm instance through the SPFarm.Local object.

• SPWebApplication—This class represents a SharePoint web application and is also a part of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace. You can access the WebApplication instance of a site through the WebApplication property of the SPSite class instance.

• SPContext—This is an important class that represents the context of the request in SharePoint. You can access various important objects of SharePoint like the SPSite and SPWeb instances for the current request through this object. To get access to this object you call SPContext.Current.

You will see as you proceed further in this book that SharePoint provides a rich object model, and you learn about many objects in detail.