Book Review: “Enterprise Application Development in SharePoint 2010” by Ira Fuchs
I had the pleasure of meeting Ira Fuchs for the first time at SharePoint Fest Dallas a few weeks ago. Ira is a SharePoint Technical Specialist at Microsoft, so I’m guessing he has access to some of the brightest SharePoint minds in the world.
As Ira and I were talking, he saw fit to gift me with a free copy of his new book, “Enterprise Application Development in SharePoint 2010”, since we seem to have overlapping interests in the SharePoint sphere. (Or is it the SharePoint wheel or the SharePoint donut?) Yes, Mr. FTC Man, I got a free copy of the book. I’m writing about it because I like it.
Ira’s book is an interestingly different take on what I call Middle Tier development. Ira uses the perhaps more correct term “declarative development” throughout his book, but many of the concepts he stresses are near and dear to my own heart. Building things in SharePoint doesn’t always mean pulling in the heavy coders.
In the book, which has the fitting subtitle “Creating an End-to-End Application without Code”, Ira takes you through developing a complex, highly useful application in SharePoint 2010 to track employee absences. This may make it seem like this isn’t the book for you, assuming you don’t want to track employee absences, but that’s not the case.
First of all, this is a process that all organizations have at some level. Even in small organizations like mine (the power of one), I need to keep track of when I’ll be available and when not. Anyone can extrapolate this application to their own processes.
Secondly, because Ira approaches this as an enterprise-class application, he touches on many of the great capabilities in SharePoint 2010; you can mix and match based upon your own needs.
The book is chock full of step by step instructions on how to get things done, from connecting to external data sources using the BCS to customizing your forms using InfoPath 2010 to creating workflows to manage the process. You’d be doing yourself a favor by adding this book to your SharePoint bookshelf.
Ira bravely self-published the book (as IHF Publishing), so support him in that risky endeavor by grabbing a copy!
I was very interested until you said InfoPath. How much InfoPath is in the book compared to other front-end development techniques? (XSLT, JavaScript/jQuery, HTML, CSS)
Matt:
It’s a “without code” book, so a huge chunk of it is focused on InfoPath. Pages 60-237 in the index.
M.
Thanks for the review, Marc. This looks like a great book. I’ve ordered my copy and look forward to learning a lot from it. However, using Infopath forms to build a Sharepoint application requires the use of Sharepoint Server 2010. Do you know of any books on building end to end applications without coding for Sharepoint 2007 or Sharepoint 2010 Foundation?
Keith:
I would definitely recommend Jim Bob Howard’s eBook Extending the Data View Web Part. “Without coding” is always a tricky thing. I find that you always end up writing *some* code.
M.