I recently took a position bringing me back into the SharePoint & .Net development world, what can I say I’m a glutton for punishment. My previous SharePoint positions had been running public facing webpages that many wouldn’t guess were SharePoint. I like making SharePoint sexy and more user friendly, partly because user centered development is something that has always stimulated my interest. I believe a good user design on the front end is more important than any of that silly back end stuff (although I have a ton of respect for database developers & designers). Users shouldn’t have to learn an application, it should be so intuitive for them to use it that it feels natural, and this is easily accomplished if you work with them throughout the development process!
With the heavy push toward mobile development, I have recently been very interested in responsive design as well, and am toying with various platforms and coding techniques to further my design skills. I’m interested in learning how to theme other content management systems besides SharePoint, including a few opensource PHP options as this seems to be the way the new web is going.
Since landing my latest position with the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) I have spent my first month delving into the SharePoint 2010 Javascript Object Model, It still amazes me I can test my code by simply refreshing a page versus pushing a feature to the server and waiting for the app to recycle! I plan on trying out the REST format as well depending on the needs of project, and have built my first application with heavy custom HTML/CSS and JQuery to make it as user friendly as possible. I started with a custom application page that uses as little SharePoint code as possible, making it primarily html and css. I already have several different posts planned on some of the things I learned (and had trouble finding complete examples for), so keep your eye out.
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Hello World