A few weeks back a reader asked me about SharePoint Tutorial for developer and since I’m a little bit behind my schedule to publish content I will post the reply I sent… If you have additions or corrections please feel free to leave a comment. I think the following resources can help you to make the change from an ASP.NET to a SharePoint developer.
To get a general overview one can start with the following…
SharePoint readings
Getting Started with Development for SharePoint Foundation
Glide Path for ASP.NET Developers
Sometimes this is a bit complicated (e.g. Service Applications) and sometimes it’s ok if you have heard about it so you know where you can find it if you really need it. If it comes to WCMS and branding it’s a good and easy start to implement the following:
Deploying Branding Solutions for SharePoint 2010 Sites Using Sandboxed Solutions
The reason why: It allows you basic branding while you don’t need to know about templates, site definitions and so on. Later on you can have a look at site definitions allowing you to create more advanced solutions:
Site Types - WebTemplates and Site Definitions
The resources require some time to read and to understand them but it should be a good start.
Tools
The most important tool will be SPDisposeCheck since a developer has to release memory used by its applications. This tool checks for problems and integrates into Visual Studio 2010:
Books
I haven’t read any books about SharePoint 2010 development yet so I can’t suggest a good one.
Development Environment
The most important part for me is the development environment which has to be a good installation so you can concentrate on development instead of administration of your development environment. There are a lot of guides how to install SharePoint… I highly recommend to use virtualization so you don’t bust your host… and you can use snapshots to test things and to revert them if there are problems.
The resources in detail look huge but it’s worth… SharePoint developers are required all over the world ;)