Not a typo in the title 🙂

Back in 2007 I was looking to move to the US and join the SharePoint engineering team.  As part of the early initial email based discussions about the role the guy I was talking to about a job asked me to list off some things I think were needed for SharePoint development.

I recently stumbled on the OneNote page where I was jotting down some notes before I sent him the email.

Here they are in all their 2007 glory (verbatim minus the bolding):

1. Remotable APIs … Or API set that wraps the Web Services
2. Integration of the FrontPage RPCs into the OM
3. Web Services that take/return object friendly OM friendly data …datasets etc…  + keep XML document based ones.
4. Ability to create “strongly typed” objects from SharePoint objects… Like strongly typed datasets

Here is my take on where we ultimately ended up for each of these:

#1 – Remotable APIs … this would become the Client Side Object Model in SharePoint 2010.
#2 – FP RPCs … this would be the ability to better interact with files and folders etc… via the CSOM.
#3 – Web Services with friendly data – this would become the first ListData.svc REST/OData endpoint in SharePoint 2010.
#4. – Strongly typed objects – this would become the work we did on Linq to SP  and SPMetal

Finding these notes was pretty nostalgic really!  It’s hard to imagine development in SP without some of these things now … especially the REST services considering how far they have come now!

It’s also interesting in that these were really the first investments in helping developers get code off the SharePoint server. Before this as a developer you really had to create and deploy your own web services and use the SP server side object model (yuck!).

What would be the four things you would write on your list today? Comment below!