Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

DEVELOPING SHAREPOINT APPLICATIONS USING NAPA

For those of you who are not new to SharePoint development, you know that getting your development environment set up can take a little time. In SharePoint 2010, you had to locally install a number of software applications, such as SharePoint, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and so on, and configure your environment for use. You were then relegated to debug on your locally installed SharePoint instance. Fast-forward to SharePoint 2013, and the development story has evolved quite a bit. For example, you can set up a cloud-based version of SharePoint (Office 365) and develop remotely against that instance; you can have a locally installed version of SharePoint and have your tools locally installed; and you also have browser-based options for quicker, lightweight application development — which you can export to Visual Studio. Enter Napa.

Napa enables you to very quickly build and deploy solutions into SharePoint using a rich browser-based approach. It allows developers to get started quickly developing for SharePoint, and if you desire, to migrate the code you write in Napa to run and debug in Visual Studio as well.

As you’ve seen, SharePoint 2013 has evolved towards the “App” model. Interestingly, Napa is really just another rich app that you can use to develop for SharePoint. So, you install it and use it just like any other app; start at the developer site and proceed from there. Figure 3-18 illustrates the live tiles that are by default ...