SharePoint development in the 2013 version has drastically changed leaving us to scratch our head as there is a lot to learn to catch up with the best process/technique of developing SharePoint apps. To make matter worst, Microsoft is push enterprise SharePoint development from on-premise to Office 365. Meaning we need not to forget the old way of writing trusted, server-side code, solutions as well as the new/future way of writing client-side code or apps in short. Having said that this blog post only refers to the latter SharePoint development scenario, which is creating SharePoint apps. The following is how I mapped my learning process. If you have a different one please let me know.
- Sign up for Office 365 environment and install Visual Studio 2013 update 3 in your local dev machine – done
- Signup for Azure as the provider hosted app that you develop will require you to have a website where you would deploy your custom code – done
- Set up on-premise SharePoint 2013 development environment by forking at least a 16 GB memory laptop, which can be very expensive but effective – done
- Install Apps for Office sample packs as well as Office Dev Github projects and start playing with the code. I preferred to run these codes in my Office 365 tenant so that it would be much faster to start the work – in progress
- First plan is to master SharePoint-hosted apps development and later move into provider-hosted apps.
- Learn JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery and Angular JS as they can be valuable tools in the SharePoint-hosted apps development life cycle.
In the next blog post I will share some of the experiences I got in my learning endeavor.
SharePoint Canada Consulting 