Is it totally wrong or should be avoided to create farm solutions inside sharepoint 2013 on-premise

Question

I started a new sharepoint 2013 enterprise server on-premise project for a customer, and on the first phase I want to do the following which requires me to create 2 farm solutions:-

1. I need to add some event receivers which get fired when new items are added to a list where the event receiver will create a new sub-site for each item
2. I also want to add an advance search web part for my list, and I found this farm solution https://splistviewfilter.codeplex.com/

So can anyone advice if I should proceed with installing the above farm solutions? Or should I be searching to do so using Apps ? To be honest if I want to use Apps in my above 2 situations, it will require me so much effort. for these reasons:

1. To implement my first requirement using Apps, I will need to create a provider hosted app, and for this I will need to install a adidicated web application to host the App.
2. To implement the second requirement, I did not find any ready-made App that provides the same functionalities as the ones provided here https://splistviewfilter.codeplex.com/

So can anyone advice how I should appraoch these requirements? Now I am saying since I am using on-premise then I should use farm solutions without any problem/worried... is this valid ?

Answer 1

You can still use Farm Solutions in your development. Maybe your customer isn't thinking about migrating to the cloud. Farm solutions are still supported in SharePoint 2016 as well, so I don't see the reason not moving forward with it. Having said that, I suggest doing prototypes and small developments on the side by yourself, just to know how to do these things using the add-in model. You want to tell your customer: "OK we can do it right now with farm solutions and they're still supported in 2016, and it's going to be faster for us to implement them now, however we are able to switch to any recommended model later on if needed."

Also, make sure not to do all of your development tasks using farm solutions, one or 2 requirements that needed farm solutions doesn't mean to do everything as a farm solution. Try to look into the newer ways of doing things. ex: JavaScript development/Remote Deployments, and so on.

Answer 2

Sharepoint add-on is new standard and MSFT encourage all the customer to adopt that one.

Main reason (there are many others)is Office 365, if your company want to move Office 365 then you have to rewrite all customs solutions as add-on. In O365 no farm solution deployment at all.

And you know this feature already on the path of death, so why not start with new standard and may be initially cost you more time but at the end you farm will be with best practices range.

Its upto you and customer, you can deploy solution with no issue as of now, but at the end of day you have to convert them into add-on. No date from MSFT for on Prem but Office 365 there no more customs solutions

Answer 3

In short, by now (December 2016), official MS guideline is "Use new add-in model whenever it's possible".

In reality, you're absolutely correct, new add-in model in most cases requires a lot more efforts and money investments.

In my opinion, you need to explain to your customer all different options available, including time, cost and consequences of selecting farm solutions model.
By now (December 2016) farm solutions are not deprecated and still you can use it, but in case if your customer has long-terms plans for SharePoint, he is planning upgrade to the latest versions of SharePoint in future, he wants to use this custom solution for all future versions of SharePoint, in that case that's one additional strong argument to go with add-in model.
I think, in one day MS will deprecate farm solutions, may be not for the next two years, but may be later.

Take a look at the picture from latest European SharePoint conference, it's about the future of SharePoint:

That means that have plans to use the same code for on-premise and online versions, and I don't think there will be a place for farm solutions in this model.

Here is additional reading from msdn, which describes all current options available and when to use them:
SharePoint Add-ins compared with SharePoint solutions