Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

CLIENT-SIDE OBJECT MODEL (CSOM) BASICS

In SharePoint 2010 Microsoft took the first steps toward providing better remote API options to developers with the introduction of the Client-Side Object Model, or CSOM. The CSOM came in three varieties:

• Managed Code (.NET)
• ECMA Script (also known as JavaScript)
• Silverlight

This model provided developers with the ability to access some functionality of SharePoint from remote code applications. For example, a Silverlight application running on a Web page could call back into SharePoint and retrieve data, or another system written in a .NET language could do the same. In fact, the underlying protocols that the CSOM used to talk to SharePoint were XML and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and were fully documented so that other systems capable of HTTP requests could make the same calls if they wanted. This was a huge step ahead of the SharePoint Server OM because your code could run remotely. It also hid much of the pain and overhead of having to deal with the SOAP Web services. However, the first version had one major drawback: it only provided API coverage to features in SharePoint Foundation such as sites, lists, and documents, and not to features available in the SharePoint Server standard or enterprise versions of the software.

SharePoint 2013 has added focus on remote APIs with the CSOM and its underlying protocols as the primary API for interacting with SharePoint moving forward. SharePoint 2013 provides access to its APIs in several ...