Search This Blog

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Development tools for SharePoint 2013

SharePoint provides whole lot of out-of-box features providing you a platform to deliver your various offerings with little involvement of development team. However; the out-of-box implementation usually needs another layer which contains added feature not provided built-in or enhancement to existing features. To facilitate this, there are tools available by Microsoft and 3rd party as well. We choose between them or in combination based on our customization requirements.

I have attempted to list most commonly used tools with brief description about it:
  1. SharePoint Designer 2013This is a free tool available for download from Microsoft' site. This tool is useful in creating no-code solution. If you are looking for following then this tool is very handy. 
    1. Master Page and Content Page Customization
    2. Designer Workflows
    3. BCS
    4. Basic Web Parts
    5. List Customization
  2. Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 - Once Visual Studio has been installed, Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio needs to be installed separately (can be downloaded from the same link as Visual Studio) to develop solutions for SharePoint. Visual Studio is needed when the out-of-the-box solutions are not enough to meet your requirements. Visual Studio allows you to develop following type of SharePoint solutions:
    1. Developing SharePoint solutions
    2. Custom Site Columns Definition, Custom Content Types and Custom Lists
    3. SharePoint Workflows
    4. Web Parts, Application Pages
    5. Packaging, Deployment and Debugging
  3. NAPA - NAPA is web based tool by Microsoft for developing apps for SharePoint Online and Office 365. This tool will allow you to develop using client side model using combination of Javascript, HTML and CSS. Thus using this tool programming is done using Client Side Object Model of SharePoint. 
  4. CAML Designer - When data needs to be fetched from SharePoint based on some filters you use XML based CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language). CAML is equivalent to the select query in SQL which defines the filters for fetching data. The CAML Designer is very useful in generating queries without having prior knowledge of the CAML schema.
  5. SharePoint Manager - SharePoint Manager allows you to view and modify the properties of every Site, List and any other entity in a site collection.
  6. SharePoint LogViewer - This tool is very handy during troubleshooting of issues where you need to go through generated logs to narrow down the root cause of the problem.
  7. Internet Explorer Toolbar / Chrome Developer Tools / Firefox Developer Tool - These tools work with the rendered HTML content and CSS in browser. These are helpful for analyzing and troubleshooting the HTML layout and CSS issues, debugging of JavaScript, allows you to set breakpoint. The feature provided depends on the tool used.
  8. InfoPath 2013 - Although, this is not a primary development tool for SharePoint development, InfoPath forms can be used to create electronic forms as an alternative to offline paper forms. It allows rapid development with no programming knowledge needed. However; it does allow coding to create forms with complex logic. SharePoint supports using InfoPath forms as display and edit forms for lists.
Do list your favorite tools in the comments section below.