Summary

SharePoint developers have a rich set of development options and tools that can be leveraged to develop and deploy rich business solutions. These solutions have the potential to increase the overall value of SharePoint and to provide capabilities not available in many organizations.

For development options we covered server-side development with the Server OM for both farm and sandbox solutions, connecting to SharePoint through web services, and client-side development using either the Client OM or jQuery directly to provide a rich experience.

For tools we covered the robust features available in Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint Designer 2010, and InfoPath Designer 2010, and how the tools match up against the development options.

I encourage everyone to spend some time working through each of the development paths so that they can better understand for themselves the pros and cons of these options as well as how their personal skills can be best leveraged to build and maintain these solutions.