With this book, Steve Fox provides a good introduction to developing on the latest release of the SharePoint platform. Though Fox is a Microsoft insider and a technical evangelist for the product, he presents a balanced write-up, without too much preaching. The word “beginning” in the title is a little misleading, though, since the SharePoint platform includes so many technologies, including ASP.NET, C#, and Extensible Markup Language (XML), that it cannot be reduced to a novice level. The book is very timely given the plethora of start-up project development that either jumped to SharePoint 2010 directly or transitioned from previous releases.

This book consists of three parts and a short appendix. In the first part, Fox introduces readers to SharePoint 2010, giving a first look at it as a business productivity platform in chapter 1 and beginning a number of exercises in chapter 2. Chapter 2 points to the necessary developer skills and development environment requirements, and then moves on to introduce both SharePoint lists and Web parts. As in the subsequent chapters, readers can type the exercises or download the code from the publisher’s Web site (http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/Beginning-SharePoint-2010-Development.productCd-0470584637,descCd-DOWNLOAD.html). Because some listings are rather lengthy, I would recommend a mixed approach. At the end of each chapter, additional resources, mainly from the Microsoft home team, point to further online reading. Veteran developers may already be familiar with them, but freshly assigned programmers will find them quite useful.

Part 2 goes more deeply into developing on this platform. Chapter 3 looks at development using multiple environments. From Web-based development to SharePoint Designer to Visual Studio to Expression Blend, Fox illustrates the versatility of the solutions offered. There is code for each exercise, as well as a section on how the solution works. Chapter 4 presents the most common developer tasks, such as creating Web parts, lists, and .aspx pages, and working with data. Chapter 5 goes into more depth about how to programmatically work with lists on the server-side and client-side object model. Chapter 6 concentrates on Web part architecture, with examples of both standard Web parts and visual Web parts. Chapter 7 puts it all into perspective with the completed development of the SharePoint application built on the scaffolding presented in preceding chapters.

Part 3 covers advanced topics in SharePoint development. Chapter 8 covers business connectivity services and, in particular, external content types from various sources such as SQL Server and custom business objects. Chapter 9 shows, in three exercises, how to integrate Microsoft Silverlight development with SharePoint, from no-touch integration to high-touch integration. Chapter 10 introduces ASP.NET, the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), representational state transfer (REST), and Azure. Due to length limitations, the book only briefly covers these topics, though they each deserve their own chapter. Chapter 11 covers integrating SharePoint with Microsoft Office, both on the client side with InfoPath and on the server side with Visio, Excel, and Word. Part 3 ends with a short introduction to securing applications on the SharePoint platform.

Overall, the book is a valuable resource for beginning SharePoint developers. Even though it was published soon after the product’s official release, it does not suffer from issues related to a rushed, premature release because Fox is an inner expert on the platform. The style is clear, and the pedagogy of the presentation is sound. Even more experienced developers can glean a few tips from the material and field novice questions from members of a team that may not have been in the trenches for long. As a training tool, I would recommend the book because of its sequence of exercises, online code base, and explanation of how the code works.

Though I found myself cutting and pasting samples in a somewhat lazy approach to the book, I see the value of typing, building, and running each of the exercises and referring to the listed resources often.