About the SharePoint Dev Wiki

As promised by Jeremy Thake, this wiki will hopefully act as a more structured online resource for SharePoint Development which will incorporate not only its own content, but references to Blogs, Forums, Wikis, List Serves, Social Bookmarks, White Papers, Microsoft sites and anywhere else that SharePoint Development is being mentioned on line.

What is this site?

The idea behind this was because so many individuals have contacted the Leaders in the Community directly or raised on various social networking tools (such as Twitter) that it is great that there is so much Information out there on SharePoint Development...but the issue is knowing which approach to take and also grouping it together in one central place rather than living in your favorite search engine.

The problem with all this information is that most of it is chronological such as blogs, forums etc. and often is updated either directly on the post or a newer post is published. This makes it hard to work out what is the most authoritative source of content and although people have pointed out that a Google search will find content.

Why use this site?

Having the content in one central place with the ability for it to evolve over time by the community contributions will be extremely valuable. There are Microsoft resources out there, but to give an example, non of them mention other productivity tools such as WSPBuilder, STSDEV, SPSource etc. which clearly the community are using...therefore this wiki should represent people in the trenches without any agendas.

This will allow people to post up solutions to requirements and get feedback from the community via comments on the pages or directly editing and adding to the wiki page content.

A good example of this occurring is the recent discussions around Site Features vs Site Templates vs Site Definitions for development approaches and the information being spread sparsely across various blogs and forums. Having this discussion occur via a wiki page will make it continually evolve and mature over time. Another one would be all the discussions around When to Dispose SharePoint objects which has been flying around the community and MSDN does not give a full commentary on it.

Jeremy founded the SharePointDevWiki with the generous donations by Atlassian with their Confluence License and Tatham Oddie (fellow Readify consultant) server space.

I want to help...where do I start

I got a great question from @fabianwilliams on twitter asking "I want to help...where do I start". Content is growing fast on the wiki, my advice if you want to contribute is to identify any gaps on the wiki that aren't covered yet at all or add some more content to areas that have already started.

Not started areas

There are various areas on the home page that haven't started yet and the community would really appreciate some kick starts here, in the Confluence wiki engine these are called Undefined Pages.

Enrich existing areas

If you have had some experience in an area that has already started, the community would really appreciate you adding any lessons learnt and also to try and document your thought process on how you came to your end solution. This will allow others to see how you got there and hopefully either help them along OR give them a sanity check on their approach.