Office as Platform Issue 6 - a quick start for SharePoint Online developer

This is the beginning of a series of articles on developing cloud applications for Office 365 SharePoint Online. In the first article of the cycle, Dmitry Plotnikov, a SharePoint consultant, talks about the organization of the workplace and the quick start of the developer of applications SharePoint Online. All articles in the column “Office as Platform” you can always find at the link #officeplatform - Vladimir Yunev.

This article is the beginning of a series of articles for SharePoint developers on the Office 365 platform. Before we begin to dive into the details, let's compare products in some aspects.

Comparison of SharePoint and SharePoint Online

If we compare products in detail by functionality, it will take a lot of time. If readers are interested in those who are interested, then read the official article in the knowledge base in the Microsoft Knowledge Base .

Consider the pros and cons of SharePoint Online (hereinafter SPO) vs SharePoint on-site.

pros
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• In SPO for you will make backups, updates and other infrastructure issues. But the same applies to the minus, because in case of problems you can not affect it
• Functional updates often occur.
• There are opportunities that will never be in SharePoint on-premises, including Yammer, Office Graph, etc.
• Out-of-box integration with products from Office 365. It doesn't always work perfectly, but you can work with it.

Minuses

• There is no possibility to write code with access to the farm
• Learn to work with existing API restrictions.

A collection of sites for developers

To create an application, a collection of sites is useful, where ready-made (or test) applications are installed.

If the following options to create such a space:

1. Create a collection of sites in your existing Office 365 subscription. Details are described here.
2. If you have an MSDN subscription, you can get Office 365 Developer Subscription for free here.
3. Buy Office 365 Developer Subscription
4. Every 30 days to create a trial subscription

Useful tools

The list does not claim to be complete, I will highlight interesting tools and extensions.

• Microsoft Office 365 API Tools for Visual Studio 2013 - write applications for working with mail, calendar, files, etc.
• SPCAF is a cool static code analyzer customized specifically for SharePoint
• Office365 Developer Patterns and Practices –Many code samples and solutions from Microsoft and the community.
• SPMETA2 - an interesting project for creating artifacts in SharePoint using code

What's next?

The following articles will cover the cycle about working with Office 365 through PowerShell, publishing applications to the Office Store, connecting to Office 365 from various applications, working with the Office Graph API, migration and code migration, organization of continuous development. Stay tuned!

To authors

Friends, if you are interested in supporting the column with your own material, please write to me at vyunev@microsoft.com to discuss all the details. We are looking for authors who can be interesting to tell about the development under Office and other topics.

about the author

Plotnikov Dmitry Alexandrovich
Founder and SharePoint Consultant @ PlotnikovSoft

Microsoft MVP since 2011, I keep a personal blog about SharePoint and Office 365. I am a small company in the implementation and maintenance of corporate systems based on SharePoint / Office365.