Microsoft SharePoint Online Standard Developer Guide

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are composed of "edge cache" servers that are strategically placed around the world at key Internet network points. These "edge cache" servers can be used to cache and deliver all types of content - including images, videos, CSS and JavaScript files.

Using a CDN can significantly improve a website's end-user performance, since it enables browsers to more quickly retrieve and download content. For example, instead of having a browser request for an image traverse all the way across the Internet to your web server to download, a CDN can instead serve the request directly from a nearby "edge cache" server that might only be a single network hop away from your customer (making it return much faster - which makes your pages load quicker).

When you create a site in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services by using the default Team Site template, the home page includes two default graphics. A Windows SharePoint Services graphic appears in the body of the page, and a picture of a house in a circle appears near the site title. You can change these graphics to customize your site. Changing the smaller graphic requires a Windows SharePoint Services compatible Web page editor

When you create a built-in or custom list in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, Windows SharePoint Services creates a Web Part, a basic building block of a SharePoint site, to display that list. These Web Parts are called List View Web Parts. Windows SharePoint Services stores List View Web Parts in the site collection Web Part gallery. (The site collection Web Part gallery is the most central gallery of Web Parts for a work group. By default, the gallery name is the name of the site, such as "Our Team Site Web Part Gallery." )

What is a SharePoint site for?
A SharePoint site is a Web site that provides a central storage and collaboration space for documents, information, and ideas. A SharePoint site is a tool for collaboration, just like a telephone is a tool for communication, or a meeting is a tool for decision making. A SharePoint site helps groups of people (whether work teams or social groups) share information and work together. For example, a SharePoint site can help you:

Coordinate projects, calendars, and schedules.
Discuss ideas and review documents or proposals.
Share information and keep in touch with other people.

Becoming familiar with Web Part customization techniques gives you a range of page-customization choices. For example, you can customize your site's home page so that it displays the specific information that your team needs. You can rearrange the list items on the home page, add lists, and even change the images on the home page. As you become more familiar with Web Part Page customization techniques, you can build interactive Web Part Pages that makes the data in lists more dynamic and useful, and you can add new Web Parts that provide access to external data and Web services.

Document libraries are collections of files that you can share with team members on a Web based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. For example, you can create a library of common documents for a project, and team members can use their Web browsers to find the files, read them, and make comments. Users with Microsoft Office 2003 can check out and edit the files as if they resided on a local or network drive.

By default, your team Web site comes with a built-in document library named Shared Documents, which is listed on the Quick Launch bar as well as on the Documents and Lists page.

I described how a new open source tool called sporm significantly simplifies unit testing SharePoint. Making SharePoint unit testable is my absolute favorite feature of sporm because SharePoint is notoriously hard to unit test. But sporm provides other benefits as well and its ability to pull us out of the depths of verbose loosely typed XML hell and into LINQ excellence is next on my list of favorite features. So in this post I'll describe the pre-sporm technique of querying with CAML, how to query data using sporm, and finally how sporm supports SharePoint's unique architecture of allowing multiple content types per list and what that means to you.

As I described in SharePoint: The Wild West of Software Development there is a serious problem when you develop for SharePoint: ensuring quality through unit testing is really, really hard. And that's where a new open source tool just released today called sporm (SharePoint Object Relational Mapper) comes in. While sporm provides many benefits besides simplified unit testing I wanted to focus on this topic first, because sporm's approach, which models the entity framework in the way it supports POCO's, is a unique feature not available with other SharePoint tools like LINQ to SharePoint.

discovered an interesting error recently while working with Microsoft's Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) that, surprisingly, had received no ink. Partly what surprises me about this is that the error may require you to rewrite large sections of your code if you haven't previously considered this SharePoint limitation. I'll start with some context, but first of all the error is:

A page in SharePoint is comprised of web parts the exist within zones. Web parts are available for just about everything. For example in the page below there are four web part highlighted by different colors. The purple web part displays a short list of the new announcements stored in the annoucements library. The pink web part displays events from a calendar within the site. The green web part displays an image from a location the user specifies. The gray web part displays a list of links from the links list on the site.