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There is an amazing amount of pain that developers in the .net space are experiencing with SharePoint development. SharePoint has become much more than a place to store documents or work with others on a file. Many enterprises are using it in unique and orignal ways and that value has been brought to the service by a growing community of developers outside of Microsoft.

I’ve been asked many times why I bother with SharePoint. While out drinking with Alan Stevens in Cleveland he could barely hold back his contempt for the platform and my participation in it. He turns to me and screams “You’re doing WHAT?! SharePoint sucks! It sucks so hard! Why the fuck would you even do that!?” He then went back to his drink. I’m sure the beer brought the rage that had been lying dormant. I get these types of reactions often.

Joe Wirtley asked me (in a much more civil manner than Alan. :) ), nearly 6 months ago, “Leon, why SharePoint? You love open source, standards, your favorite language is Ruby. You’re an avid supporter of testing. SharePoint development seems to be the opposite of all of those things.” Joe’s observation and ability to articulate the confusion of my peers is exactly why I’m taking a few moments to blog about my choices. Those who read this blog know that I have a language fetish and hop often. Folks who found me for my Rails articles have probably long since moved on to other rock stars in that community. I had little or nothing to contribute or say about Rails anymore so I haven’t. Many kind people have asked about future articles on Rails but the truth of the matter is that there is a buzzing community around Rails doing just that. The area is covered and I feel good about moving on. I love Rails. I love Ruby and I’ll continue to use it as appropriate but if there’s one thing that I’ve realized in this business its not to put all of your eggs into one technology basket. Besides, it’s not my nature to stay tied down to tech or platform.

So, why this post? There is a lot of pissing and moaning on the internet these days about SharePoint as a bad development platform. Really? Well, it’s not developer centric, I’ll give you that. There are many challenges that go into developing for SharePoint when you compare it to non-platform specific development. Unfortunately, many of these developers who are in pain are making a comparison of SharePoint development to other forms of asp.net development. This is made worse by those, like myself, who are constantly saying that SharePoint development is, at its core, asp.net development. A statement that is true only in the sense that WSS 3.0 is built on asp.net. The comparison is not 1 to 1 and when the developer, perhaps an expert in asp.net, tries SharePoint and sees the poor tooling, documentation or worse finds one of the many bugs in the Object Model they throw their hands in the air and walk away from the table.

But that’s not enough to make a man angry. That’s not enough to make him go onto a blog and yell at the masses for days. It’s certainly not enough to make a fat man in a plaid hat re-think his life while having drinks in Cleveland. No, the difference is that SharePoint is a platform that is usually endorsed by the enterprise. Meaning, the developer is thrust into the environment and expected to perform at the same level that they have in the past with asp.net; after all, the Microsoft rep assured the management team that the learning curve would be low considering the platform is “just asp.net”. Yeah. And there’s not difference between merb and rails either or Django and Pylons. Now they’re angry and they should be.

So that’s where I come in. I’m in SharePoint everyday. I did it while consulting and I’m helping to bring Community Server into SharePoint (a union that gets stronger and stronger every day) and I do it everyday. The path was long and difficult and I had to pave my own road for most of it. Starting today, I’m going to share my experiences with you. I’m going to share my point of view, as a developer working in SharePoint. ‘cause right now I feel like the guy who still loves his Dreamcast and says it was fantastic while everyone looked at me cross eyed.

I’m not saying it’s not difficult. I’m not saying there is a small learning curve. I’m not saying the barrier to entry is low. I am saying that it is a rich and rewarding platform that has more to offer than most are giving it credit for. I, personally, have said some unkind things about SharePoint development out of anger and frustration. I’ve since learned that it’s just as easy to file a bug report and move on. Count me as one guy who does it. I’m frustrated, sure, but nothing worth having isn’t without some effort. Details will follow soon but for now... lighten up a bit and enjoy life. ;)