Microsoft’s Silverlight is hot favorite among all the tools available in the market for developing applications. Being powered by .NET framework it had came into existence in the initial phase of web industry from the house of Microsoft and has seen a long journey till date. Now, much has changed all these years, the process of development the platform for which the apps are developed, etc. Still how it has kept developers engaged to it is the question of man. Mobile being the talk of the hour is the podium for which maximum apps are being developed so a peek over it with some statistics related to Silverlight might clear this up. A fine fact is shared here; the numbers are based on usage statistics from Mobile Entrée 365 available in Office app store for SharePoint online. The data has been collected recently on May 12 to 19, 2014. According to them, 78% of deployments have done some sort of mobile customization. 12% of all the time users made use of ‘search’ instead of direct browsing. All these points that app are going to be here and so is the name SharePoint supporting its backbone be it mobile or web.
More about the app development using SharePoint
It sounds real good when someone tells you that SharePoint is the things which you must have for your app development. But, the fact is unless and until you are aware of the environments and extensiveness of it you will not e able to make most use of it for your benefit. Being in any projects where the client demands for following agile SharePoint application development process in India, being a developer in most of the cases it is seen that people take us the task. It is ok if you are in good relationship with it, but in case you have no idea then do collect some and then commit. A company which is known to offers services related to this orientation always has team members and professionals who are aware about the environment, syntax styles and deployment catches while working with it. Not to mention the additional years of experience comes really handy.
If you are working on a corporate website the making use of SharePoint for Web Content Management (WCM) or Customer Experience Management (CXM) is a great idea. While being in the project cycle certain things must be considered at all times for desired end-result.
Much needed ingredients for development
These set of ingredients are approach style, safety measures and coding pattern, etc. One must make sure to keep a note of all these for the success of the project.
1. One should always make sure to pack every update in a fresh wsp file on the prod. This is to make sure that a backup stays behind in case something goes wrong.
2. Do not change the schema for any of the list template features in case the list instances have been created by then. Any changes on demand must be done via Objective Model.
3. Always keep the original dll file in GAC. For the sake of workflow do not change it. If that is very essential make a new dll and pack the workflow modifications inside it.
4. Keep yourself away from making use of extra panels like Grid, etc. Once where they are needed use those.
5. Prefer using grid style as it is more complying with mobile platforms.
Above are some major areas of Sharepoint app development and the things which must be kept in mind while engaging in a SharePoint app development endeavor.
