How shall i approach this scenario

Question

I am a asp.net developer but not done sharepoint development before.

Below is my scenario: 'Company A' has asked to me to create a new home page for their intranet. 'Company A' is currently using a on premise installation of Sharepoint 2013. The home page will be deployed to a test environment first and then to the main environment.

Below is a list of requirements which i have to create: 1. New Intranet Home Page (this will probably have a separate css file also) 2. New Custom List which will appear on the new home page 3. New Discussion Board which will appear on the new home page 4. New Events Calender which will appear on the new home page 5. It has to be done using visual studio because of source control.

What should i create this as (e.g. app, farm/sandbox solution etc)?

Do you know of any tutorials which do something similar?

Have you got any other recommendations or tips?

Answer 1

Well I'm in a similar boat as you, I .NET Developer / DBA who was task with creating a site in share point. My suggestion would be first to follow some basic tutorials to get your self accustomed to Share Point. There is a lot of out of the box functionality that could be used without ever having to write one line of code.

You mentioned source control, share point can keep versions of each page / list / calendar/ etc. Thus it already has some source control built in.

Here is link to Microsoft Site to download Training kit that will get you started. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=6184

Environment that I have setup based on recommendation of another developer in the company is. VW Workstation (or anything else for virtualization) once you have your virtual environment than make sure to replicate what ever they have,example 2008 Windows Server with Sharepoint 2010, etc. This way you can give your self complete access and you can simulate multiple users and groups by setting up your own domain.

Answer 2

So, here's the thing, you could, do this in Design Manager and then copy out your artefacts and check them into source control. Yeah, it kinda sucks to have that manual process but it is achievable.

I'm going to assume that by a new 'home page' you mean that you need to create a new master page for your site and that the home page itself needs either a new webpart page or a new page layout.

From a 'pure dev' perspective one approach that works is to create an 'Empty SharePoint Solution' project in VS, use 'Module' items to deploy the resources (css, aspx, masterpage etc.) to where they need to go. You can also use project items to provision your new lists etc.

As this is a 2013 project I would strongly suggest building the new look and feel using the Design Manager in a Development environment. The new lists can be provisioned by hand and the list views that you need on the home page can be inserted there by hand too.

Honestly if you don't really understand how to go about this in a coded manner from the get go and don't have someone available to help then I would strongly recommend that you don't write any .NET code and make the most of the customisations that are available via the web browser.