Introducing SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 as a Development Platform

Over the past few years, Microsoft SharePoint has experienced a rapid rate of adoption in the software industry. As more and more companies and organizations begin to use SharePoint technologies, there has also been a significant increase in the number of software development projects that target SharePoint environments. The industry is currently witnessing scores of professional developers who are migrating to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 from other development platforms, such as Microsoft ASP.NET, Lotus Notes, Enterprise JavaBeans, and IBM WebSphere, just to name a few.

SharePoint Development Building Blocks

Although you can create many different types of components within a SharePoint solution, the most common type is a Feature. A SharePoint Feature provides a mechanism for adding elements to a target website or site collection through a process known as Feature activation. The types of elements that you can add to a site include menu commands, link commands, page templates, page instances, list definitions, list instances, event handlers, and workflows.
Every Feature has an activation scope that defines the context in which the Feature can be activated and deactivated. For example, a Feature can have an activation scope setting of Web, which means that it can be activated and deactivated within the context of the a website. If you create a Feature that has an activation scope of Site, your Feature definition is then activated and deactivated within the scope of a site collection. The two other possible activation scopes for a Feature definition are WebApplication scope and Farm scope.