SharePoint 2010 is a significant leap forward from the 2007 release, and 'you will find that there are a ton of features built into the platform for you to leverage in your solution development. Because SharePoint is a broad platform that covers a lot, this book also covers quite a bit of ground. As a Wrox Beginning book, the goal of Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development is to get you started with many of the fundamentals so that you can continue on to advanced programming beyond this book.

In this book, you will see coverage of the following:

• Getting started with development for SharePoint 2010
• Becoming familiar with tools that you will use to develop for SharePoint
• Becoming familiar with common SharePoint development tasks
• Programming against lists and developing custom Web parts
• Integrating line-of-business (LOB) data with SharePoint and Microsoft Office
• Integrating Silverlight and SharePoint
• Creating service-oriented solutions for SharePoint
• Integrating SharePoint and Microsoft Office
• Security fundamentals in SharePoint

This book will not cover SharePoint 2007, but will cover areas that span SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.

The book's goal is to quickly take you from the basics of SharePoint, to installing and configuring a development environment, and then into how you can develop for SharePoint. The book is heavy on coding exercises, but tries to stick to a common set of .NET patterns to ensure you walk away with understanding the different ways in which you can code for SharePoint. Moving from beginning to advanced means that you can expect the walkthroughs and chapters to become increasingly more complex within each chapter and throughout the book. The walkthroughs have been created to be concise and to guide you through all of the steps you must accomplish to complete a coding task.

The structure of the book mimics the development ramp-up cycle for SharePoint. That is, you must first understand the breadth of the SharePoint platform. You then install it and the development environment; and then you begin to code - simple at first, but tasks that grow increasingly more complex. You will find that when coding against SharePoint, you may do certain things more (such as programming against lists and creating custom Web Parts). As such, these topics are covered in Part II of the book. Also, you may find that, as you advance in your SharePoint development, you will need to incorporate either Silverlight or Web services in your SharePoint solutions. Because you would likely combine these types of tasks inside of a custom Web Part, list-based application, or event receiver, these were placed in Part III of the book.

Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development is aimed at the developer who is new to SharePoint. The book assumes you have some programming experience and a passion to learn how to develop for SharePoint. But this book does not assume that you've programmed against SharePoint before. With regard to your general development background, the two assumptions in this book are that you have some familiarity with Web development, and you have an understanding of .NET programming. With regard to Web development, this book assumes that you understand HTML, and may have an understanding of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Extensible Markup Language/Extensible Stylesheet Language (XML/XSL), and dynamic languages such as JavaScript. You may have a light understanding of ASP.NET and are looking to apply this knowledge to the SharePoint space. In any case, you have some understanding of the fundamentals of Web and .NET development, and are looking to apply those to the SharePoint space.