Customer Reviews

Professional SharePoint 2007 Development (Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Most of the SharePoint books out there focus on the basic features of WSS, including lists, document libraries, views, blogs, wikis, etc. Although these are integral parts of SharePoint, they don't begin to scratch the surface of what it has to offer.

This book begins to cover these details. Topics such as building a true development/production environment, designing an enterprise portal application, creating custom field types (not just creating custom columns), creating web parts, building custom features and solutions, and programming through the object model are important to SharePoint developers creating SharePoint content in Visual Studio.

This book also takes great aim as documenting that which hasn't been documented yet, especially the XML schemas of features, elements, and solutions.

Finally, the book focuses on the enterprise portal features of MOSS, including Excel services, the Business Data Catalog, Enterprise Search, and Document Management.

Because this book focuses heavily on development, Content Managers will be better off choosing another book from the many out there for creating lists, customizing master pages, creating style sheets, and other content topics.

But for SharePoint portal architects and development programmers, this is your book. There's a wealth of information in this book and deserves to be in your library.

Considering the plethora of subjects which should be covered on MOSS 2007 this book is thorough. When it comes to depth this book loses its five stars (I would give 4 ½ if it was possible). Let's first make it clear that I strongly recommend this book. This being said, I add that this book does not cover enough to get someone prepared to be a Sharepoint Developer. However, it is a good starting point for experienced developers trying to get a grasp of what it entails Sharepoint Development. Let's go chapter by chapter:

1. The Microsoft Application Platform and Sharepoint
Good introduction to terms and technologies used by Sharepoint and Windows (when relevant to Sharepoint). But if you don't know what LDAP is, you won't learn it from here. Don't expect either programming references to authentication mechanisms (though you are going to see a few things in Chapter 5).

2. MOSS 2007 Overview for Developers
It contains a General Overview of MOSS architecture. It brings an entire topic listing the software pieces you should/must install and put together to developer for MOSS (very useful). It also explains how to install most of the utilities and, yes, they know you will prepare VPCs for this task and explain you better ways to do it, step by step, including the steps to set up remote debugging.

3. The Sharepoint User Experience
I only passed through this chapter but it seemed to be important for those not so familiar with WSS and MOSS. Here you start to see some coding.

4. WSS v3 Platform Services
WSS 3 is much powerful than its antecessor. This chapter is a good reference to templates location, site definition files, navigation, master pages, modules etc. You also can see a detailed step by step on how to create a Custom Site Definition. There are also the steps to extract the public key of an assembly without having to copy it manually from GAC (you will need this for the whole book and during your development). I used this chapter for my first Sharepoint development which was a feature to concatenate various MS Word documents from a file list into one. The book was not of much help, but it introduced me to the M.O. so I could research in the Internet for the various parts I needed to put together. But the lesson on how to create the CAB file almost redeemed the lost star.

5. Programming Windows Sharepoint Services
This chapter alone would worth the purchase of the whole book and may suffice as reference for most application types. It approaches the SP Object Model. The references you need to add in order to develop using Visual Studio. Here you also learn how to handle events (useful to write a handler to log which user spends more average time with check-out documents, for example). It also shows another way of retrieving the public key of an assembly (when it is the GAC). SP Webservices also enables access to SP Object Model and this chapter gives "a tiny glimpse" (using the author's words) of them. I felt as it deserved a whole chapter as with Webservices we are able to develop in an environment without MOSS installed. This is more important because the documentation at Microsoft is shallow on Webservices.

6. A Sample Collaboration Solution
7. RSS, Blogs, and Wikis
8. Building Personalized Solutions

I just browsed these chapters, so I'd better not comment. I know that chapter 8 will save my live someday.

9. Using Enterprise Search
This chapter comes with a sample code to retrieve search content programmatically which is very useful. Most of the chapter concerns configuration though.

10. Using the Business Data Catalog
This is the most disappoint chapter of all. I was very interested in learning how to transform a Webservice definition into an Application Definition File. Though it comes with nearly 28-pages of innocuous examples of ADF, this chapter is not able to explain how to create a ADF out of a webservice or database definition.

11. Building Document Management Solutions
I am still working in this one and it seems to be one of the best chapters too. It enables you to create customs lists, specially for document management. I don't know if the depth is enough yet, but so far so good.

I did not have the time to go into the other chapters yet.

Appendix A - Using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WSS 3.0
These extensions are not good enough. This appendix helped me know for sure what I suspected.

I also missed information on debugging. There is something on Webservices debugging in Chapter 4, but I would have enjoyed if there was more information.

If you need to extend MOSS functionality, or integrate other systems with MOSS, this book will help get you going.

The MOSS SDK is a good reference, but doesn't provide much direction. This book fills in those gaps and gives you good, real world examples of MOSS development.

Good examples of workflow, and the chapter on BDC was very helpful for us.

Highly recommended.

I have 15+ years development experience on the Microsoft Platform (in C/C++, C#, VB/.Net etc). I am trying to pick up SharePoint (WSS+MOSS) development as an additional skill. I bought this book because of the reviews on this page. In retrospect I am very surprised by them. I am about half way through the 4th chapter and I am about to chuck this book in the trash can. After reading the first two chapters I stopped and read Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services Step by Step from Microsoft Press and Beginning Beginning SharePoint 2007 Building Team Solutions with MOSS by Wrox Press (from cover to cover) to better familiarize myself with the product. I came back to this book and it's still not helping me much. Terms are being thrown around without being introduced at all. The writing style of the authors seems to be such that they assume you already know the subject inside out (in which case, I wonder, why would anyone read a book with a title like this one). I hope they understand what they have been saying in there. Perhaps it would help someone who already has a lot of experience with the subject matter and wants to use this book as a reference (though it is not tagged as a reference but rather a development book). The author is constantly referring the reader to WSS SDK. Dan Attis - I already have the SDK. If I wanted to read it why would I buy this book? I'm looking for some structured learning material here. I've just about had it with all the details being out of scope of this book. Here are a few examples so far from Chapter 4 alone:
Page 104 "The details surrounding the schema.xml file that is used to define a List Definition is beyond the scope of this book but can be researched at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms459356.aspx."

Page 116 "A more complete examination of the child elements of the Module element is beyond the scope of this book."

Page 124 "This last task is beyond the scope of this book and will not be demonstrated; however, feel free to peruse the SDK and see how easy it is to accomplish."

Page 131 "The details of implementing field editor controls are beyond the scope of this book but, as always, are described in detail in the SDK."

Page 149 "The meat and potatoes of list schemas are beyond the scope of this book, but if you are the curious type, take a look at the Features for each of the out-of-the-box lists because that is where their list schemas are now defined."

Page 152 "The details on how to use these classes are beyond the scope of this book"

... and I am only about half way through this chapter. The stated goal of the chapter is to familiarze oneself with the various features whose details the author refuses to go into.

I wonder which part of the words "Professional" and "Development" didn't the author understand? Did the technical editor do his/her job? Was the book even reviewed before it was published? I would say this is a very unprofessional and sloppy work.

There was a time when Wrox Press used to have a support email address where queries about the content of a book could be sent. In the past I have had responses from the said email address. Now they have P2P forums which apparently no one seems to read. Nice work Wrox press. Let the consumers who paid their hard earned money to buy the book help each other out, if they can. Great business plan.

I am starting my search for a different book starting now.

The book probably has the most complete set of diagrams and information about the SharePoint Architecture you can find anywhere. It provides fantastic background to and understanding of the wide spectrum of SharePoint topics/capabilities. That being said I was a bit disappointed by the lack of depth in this book. As mentioned in a few reviews the book does not provide great depth to featuer, web part, and solution developers who may need to leverage the more powerful capabilities of SharePoint. (Probably due to the fact that it would be about 4 times the size if it did.)

The book is extrememly well written and I find it very easy to find the information I am looking for as a starting point to getting more indepth information from other sources.

I always find WROX books are the best value for money. This book is no exception. The details this book provides is atypical and that is what I find very useful. Devil is in the details and we need that for programming.

If you are interested in Solutions Development on SharePoint Platform, this book is a very good companion.

Overall a good read, but needs some help:

A) More WSS3.0 related matter, this book's primary focus is on MOSS
B) Better coverage of Web Parts, including AJAX development as well as custom list definitions may have been helpful.

I have read many SharePoint books and indeed this is one of the best. The topics have been covered in great detail. The book starts of with an in introduction to the Microsoft Application Platform and how SharePoint Server integrates into the Platform. It then goes on to cover the various features of the product and how to develop applications using those features. The chapter I liked most was the "WSS V3 Platform Services" which covers in detail creating site definitions, custom field types, features, solutions and web parts.

If you are developing SharePoint solutions I suggest you read the book

I was given this book by one of the Author (John Holiday) during a training on Enterprise Content Management. I have collected quite a few books on SharePoint most proclaiming to be a developers guide but they have chapters after chapters devoted to configuring WWS 3.0 or MOSS. However, this book gives you a very good start and provides step by step guide on creating various solution.
I would recommend this for all beginners and intermediate developers!!!

Working on a few projects I needed to find some good Sharepoint 2007 reference books. This book is excellent with the examples it provides and the way they authors explain it to you. Very easy to understand, clear and concise.

I do however wish they had more real world examples like for example when working with events in sharepoint they would show you how to retrieve the id's from the list lookups when assigning to another list programmatically, or how to change the permission of a selected item for a selected specific group or person, or access active directory.

Other than that, it is a good book that will help you get along your way.