Introduction

When many people first encounter Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), they are often confused. Out of the box, a lot of people have trouble figuring out what it does and what it’s for. The most important thing to realize about SharePoint is that it isn’t intended to be a complete, off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped product. Rather, MOSS is a development platform, upon which powerful and compelling portal applications can be built. This book provides developers with a thorough, in-depth guide to the internals of writing code for the SharePoint platform. SharePoint programming can be divided into four main categories: programming the object model, programming the web services, programming the Web Parts, and programming the enterprise content.

Programming the SharePoint object model involves writing code that physically resides on one of the front-end servers in a SharePoint web farm. Web services expose powerful SharePoint functionality to applications that do not reside on the same server as SharePoint, such as smart clients and other remote servers. Web Parts are components that can be dropped onto Web Part pages within a SharePoint site, which provide valu- able displays for various types of data and functionality. Finally, enterprise content programming involves working with the Business Data Catalog.