Codeless SharePoint?

Isn’t the whole idea about SharePoint not to have to make another request to the IT Department each time you need some functionality?

That was my take a year and a half ago when I came to Xavier University and jumped in as a noob SharePoint Developer and Administrator. I had been coding in classic ASP and .net for several years, jumped into AJAX with both feet and found I was enjoying be able to rapidly deploy and reuse all kinds of functionality in the Web Development business.

SharePoint is the next evolution in the web devlopment world. Back in the late 90’s you could make good money hand coding HTML in notepad. The spread of Content Management Software and tools like Dreamweaver and FrontPage made it possible for endusers to bypass coders to get their static web pages out there.

SharePoint now makes it possible, at least in theory, of users handling their own permissions, creating sites, managing content and tons of out of the box functionality. The problem is that it is a tough learning curve and developers like me are often tempted to ‘Code’ our way out of tight spots in SharePoint.

There are several good reasons NOT to do this:

• Who knows if your custom code will work in the next service pack or SharePoint 2010.
• If you figure it out out of the box or with SharePoint Designer, your business users can do it, then later on they will come up with their own solutions instead of depending on you. The whole idea is to free up the developers time.
• There are many things you can do faster using SharePoint functionality than coding. If you code your way out of every corner you will miss the built in functionality and clever innovations that can do the same thing

That being said, there is still code, such as javascript, jquery and maybe some xmlt. Fortunately its code that can be copied and pasted by anyone knowing how to right click a mouse. Having SharePoint Designer is required for somethings and some css and HTML might have to be transversed, however, you will not have to open visual studio for any of these solutions.