Chapter 1
Getting Started with SharePoint and the Cloud
What's in This Chapter?
- Understanding the cloud and its importance
- Integrating the cloud with SharePoint
- Setting up your development environment
- Creating your first SharePoint and cloud application
In this first chapter, you'll learn about what the cloud is and why it's important. You'll also learn about the set of cloud technologies that this book uses to integrate with SharePoint: Windows Azure, Web 2.0, Bing Maps, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. To get started with your development, you'll walk through how to get your development environment up and running, using one of two options: a native installation or a prepped virtual machine. Once your development environment is up and running, you'll finish the chapter by creating your first cloud-based application for SharePoint.
Overview of the Cloud
Increasingly, “the cloud” is being discussed as a major inflection point for the next generation of IT. In fact, depending on what you read, “inflection point” might be an understatement; research institutions like Gartner and Forrester are characterizing the cloud as a “disruptive shift.” This is because of the shift from the traditional software development and deployment process (which predominantly lives in an on-premises data center or lab) is evolving more towards a services-driven approach in which software lives in the cloud.
Regardless of how we characterize the cloud, though, we must answer a common set of baseline questions ...
