Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

INTRODUCING REMOTE APIS IN SHAREPOINT 2013

When SharePoint first started gaining traction with users all across the world around the year 2002, the product was very different than the developer friendly platform it is today. Initially, SharePoint wasn’t built with developers in mind. It didn’t offer good extensibility points or customization techniques, which lead to people’s customizing SharePoint in unsupported and often fragile ways. Microsoft heard loud and clear from people all over the world that they wanted to be able to do things such as change the branding and make templates for parts of SharePoint. As a result, releases such as SharePoint 2007 and the move from ASP to ASP.NET represented great steps forward, and new options for extensibility emerged. People were able to build Web parts and had access to SharePoint’s Server-Side Object Model (Server OM) that allowed them to call into SharePoint data and perform operations programmatically. These features enabled developers to build solutions of all kinds. However, this code that leveraged the Server OM ran as part of SharePoint’s processes. The code would load within SharePoint, which made it vital to ensure that it was of high quality; otherwise, the code could adversely affect SharePoint. Issues such as high memory consumption and high CPU load became prevalent. In fact, Microsoft has often acknowledged that many of the critical support issues customers raised with them had their root cause identified as issues with ...