Things You Should Do Before Becoming a SharePoint Developer

As the tech market is increasing on vast scale, it has opened unlimited development opportunities for designers and developers. But, when it comes to the development part, the developers are always  have a confusion on which language is to choose, is it good to learn hardcore coding or it is not so essential, and many other such questions.

Commonly, .Net developers switch to SharePoint development and start working on coding. Sometimes they get the success, but sometime they don't. Whether you should choose SharePoint development or not, has always been a topic of confusion. Here are some points that will help you to make a clear decision.

Start From the Beginning

Many of the .Net developers think that it is quite easy to leave Visual Studio and start writing code to make SharePoint. But, somehow it is not that good concept. Do you have any idea, what you need to do before you write a line of code in SharePoint? In the industry, many of the SharePoint developers not even know how to use SharePoint, properly.

For example, while creating or manipulating SharePoint lists & libraries in code, you need to understand how to create & manipulate them in the user interface first. There are number of resources, blogs and websites that offer tutorials, video training, white papers, etc. If you want to use SharePoint site, then just explore it and start using it.

Become a Power User

If you think that after learning the basics of SharePoint, you have become a SharePoint developer and start development work, then you are wrong. After learning the SharePoint, the another step you should take is to become a power user of SharePoint. When it comes to becoming a power user of SharePoint, you need to know all its pros and cons, as well as the more advanced features of SharePoint, including content types, page layouts, master pages, workflows, publishing, managed metadata, business connectivity services and many more. Also, you need to learn about its capabilities, peculiarity and limitations that helps in your development process.

Why Does This Matter?

Although, you need to learn SharePoint before coding, but why it is required? Instead of wasting the time on re-inventing the common functionality, and writing the business logic that can’t be achieved through the user interface, it's better to focus on the areas that cannot be customized, there you will write less code, and the testing and bug fixing cycle will also get reduced.

Other Factors to Consider

If you want to become one amongs the professional SharePoint developers, it is essential that you determine the usability of the solution. SharePoint is not the most instinctive web platform to start with. But once you have mastered it, you don’t require to introduce an interface. If you already understand that how to use the interface, you learning phase will be much smaller. As well as you would be able to focus on your training on the specific functionality and business logics that are written by you.