Microsoft SharePoint: Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# 2005

Wow! I like the way Scot Hillier wrote this book. For experienced .net developers new to sharepoint, this book must be on your book shelf. Scot Hillier walks you through fundamental aspects of Sharepoint, and shares his insightful thoughts along the path. At first, I do not understand why he solves problems using a variety of Microsoft technologies such as Visual Studio, InfoPath, Sharepoint Designer. To me, isn't that Visual Studio enough? Later, I realize that his way is the best since he picks the right tool for the right moment. However, I do not see an enterprise sample in his book. I do expect that. Second, web part security is a tough topic. I expect more explanation. In the exercise, a medium trust level is used. According to the context of that chapter, a minimal trust level should be used.

I remember when I was learning MTS I bought Scot's book, MTS Programming With Visual Basic, and was truly amazed at what an easy read it was on such a technical subject. The reason is very clear. Scot knows what he is wrting about not only from a technical perspective, but also from a business perspective. His insights are priceless. I thoroughly enjoyed his MOSS 2007 book and recommend it highly. Personally, I am very thankful that people like Scot take the time to write valuable books like this one. He makes up for other authors, who write huge books, that are painful to read and contribute nothing. One such author, and apparently his editors, does not even know that he is the "principal" not "principle" author of his book.

This book's a critical resource if you're doing development on the SharePoint 2007 platform. The book hits a solid overview of the many features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and also gives you good dives into many of those same features. The book also deals with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and lays out differences between WSS and MOSS. Hillier does a great job of covering the gory details of MOSS and hits the pros and cons of each feature. One example would be the hideous XML you have to hand-generate for working with the Business Data Catalog. He also does a great job discussing one of my recent pain points: workflow. Hillier lays out the strengths of the feature (workflow's power of process automation), then talks about the warts of the feature (design difficulties, numerous issues surrounding SharePoint Designer, etc.). Hillier is also honest about where MOSS features fall short, such as the note laying Hillier's preference for the K2 workflow engine over that of native Windows Workflow Foundation on MOSS. The book is structured in a concise, highly usable fashion. Hillier discusses topics, then uses clearly written examples to walk you through the topic. All the examples are implemented in an environment that Hillier focuses an entire chapter on setting up. That chapter (#2) is one of the book's gems since it shows you how to get an entire development infrastructure set up and configured using Virtual Server to host three separate machines. If you've already had exposure to MOSS then the book may not have a lot of extras for you. The dives into each feature aren't necessarily extremely deep dives, but they are good enough to get you well-versed with the concepts. Hillier's book is an absolute must-have if you're looking to move in to any sort of work on the MOSS platform.

Scot knocks a home run over the fence with this book. This book somehow manages to touch on virtually all the hot topics in Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a mere 500 pages. It is an easy read with fantastic samples. This book should be on every developer's desk if anything for the 30-some pages in chapter two that walks you though setting up MOSS 2007 development environment using MSFT's Virtual Server. I'm recommending this book to all my customers.

I have been trying to get ramped up on SharePoint 2007 ever since before the Beta 2 Tech Refresh a few months ago. To say that the landscape of good information on SharePoint 2007 is slim would be an understatement. The SDK that Microsoft ships is barely usable. Scott Hillier's book really took things to the next level in my opinion. If you are going to be customizing the out of the box SharePoint setup, then I can't recommend this book highly enough. It was easy to read and well edited, I was able to make it through most of the book on a 6 hour trip I just went on. Excellent book... if you can afford only one, I'd go for this one.