Hacker News Reader

Really? I'd actually be interested to hear more about Sharepoint. My experience with it is getting to be awhile ago, and it was VERY unpleasant. What does it do for developers now?

View on HN

The single biggest thing for me was the framework for deploying "apps" through azure. You can create webparts or other bits of functionality that can be reused but hosted externally on Azure. There is a self-hosted option where the URL is a generated one but has a trust setup already; but there is also the option to use your own azure hosting but you need configure the trust yourself. One other thing I liked is that there is no more need for a SharePoint Designer - there is a new method of designing sites that is way more configurable than in the past. You can configure almost everything, but as it always is, you will find that you need to do quite a bit of research on your own to get things 100%.

All in all though, it is a very solid offering from MS that nobody really talks about. One of the main pain points from the past is that everyone thought it was a CMS when really it was a document management system. Now it actually can be both. There is a talk on YouTube from the unveiling of 2013 that is well worth a watch (although it is over an hour long)

You program "Apps" for it that work very much like Facebook Apps. It's all web standards: get an oath token with sufficient scope from the user and then use the new _api to get data in and out.

.net, Azure and javascript are supported and documented best, but you can use any language and run SharePoint apps on any platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com