Using Visual Studio, how can I reference a SharePoint 2010 site collection outside of the development machine?

Question

I am creating a custom web service which needs to reference a specific site collection on our SharePoint 2010 farm.

The web service is on a development machine not part of the farm (although SharePoint 2010 is installed on it), so using the following doesn't work:

SPSite site = new SPSite(url);

"url" in this case is the url to the existing SharePoint 2010 farm, hosted externally to this development machine.

Is there a method to 'talk' to the existing SharePoint 2010 farm outside of the development environment i am using?

Answer 1

When you are outside of SharePoint farm, the Client Object Model is the only way to talk with SharePoint.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ee535451(v=office.14).aspx

SPSite site = new SPSite(url);

Instead of above, you can use

string siteUrl = "http://MyServer/sites/MySiteCollection";

ClientContext clientContext = new ClientContext(siteUrl);

Almost every Server Object Model has an equivalent Client Object Model

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Few more things

Assemblies of Client Object Model can be found in NuGet. In the package manager console paste following

Install-Package Microsoft.SharePoint.Client

Do not forget to specify authentication credentials.

clientContext.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("user", "password", "domain");

Do a google, you will find so many ways to accomplish your goal.