I’m going to start my dev journal by expressing my frustrations at Microsoft SharePoint and all that it stands for. Usually, I am a man that likes to create his own solutions from the ground up simply because it’s better that way. There are several reasons for that, among which the possibility of knowing the classes you work with, creating your own workflow, setting your own standard of functionality. These would be only the major advantages of working with your own code. In the following article I will assess some of the things I like and many more things I dislike about Microsoft’s SharePoint solution. By “SharePoint” I am going to refer to the more crippled edition that is Windows SharePoint Services, available as a free download from Microsoft’s website and installable on any computer running Windows Server 2003 or 2008.

Now, why have I picked up SharePoint in the first place? Well, sometimes you don’t get to play by your own rules and a client requests that a specific tool be used in the development of his solution and, since the customer is (almost) always right I set up in my trek amidst the tangled jungle of what is possibly the best and worst thing to happen to ASP.NET-based solutions lately. I’ve only worked with the thing for 3 weeks now, so I’m still learning the ropes so I’ll beg your pardon if I speak out of my league. On the surface, SharePoint looks like a real time and money saver, since it offers a lot of functionality straight out-of-the-box. It handles your security, it handles all those nasty things like organizing your users, permissions, groups, websites, content so you don’t have to. Basically you could build a simple Team Site for your small business right from the start, without the hassle of writing code, worrying about exceptions, databases, connections, classes and other outerworldly stuff like that.

What could be wrong with such a real life-saver you ask? Well, the first and most outright flaw is that in protecting your average Joe who just got a job as a website admin at your small business, it also cleverly and sneakily hides errors and exceptions from the naked eye. While I wouldn’t expect such a solution to start spilling it’s guts and present tens of lines of exception traces outright on my screen, I’d still appreciate a bit more than just “An error has occurred!” It would help a lot at least pointing a bit in the right direction rather than fully protecting the feeble minded trainee in the arts of drag-and-drop website creation. It is indeed true that more detailed explanations can be found in the Windows Application Log, but these are more often than not cryptical and sometimes not even very accurate.

A second thing, if you can get over the crappy error reporting system, is that it is as pretentious as it is practical. Upon installation, you are asked whether you would like a Standard or a Server Farm installation. Should you make the tragic mistake of choosing a “Standard” installation, you’ll find out you’ll get more than you bargained for. It will automatically install Windows Internal Database which is basically a named instance of a crippled SQL Server Express Edition [quite straightforwardly named Embedded Edition] and will use that for storing it’s configuration and website tables and whatnot. I have found that SharePoint can be quite buggy and it at one time simply stopped connecting to this Internal Database [conveniently accessible only through a named pipe]. No reason or explanation provided, the whole thing just refused to stop working. The downside is that since I selected “Standard” on installation, I couldn’t just go back and change to “Server Farm” mode. I had to uninstall the blasted thing, manually remove it’s registry residues and reinstall using the other option.

A third thing would be that it’s quite buggy. As I’ve said above, at one time it simply stopped connecting to it’s damned Internal Database after I have deleted and added a site collection. Also, you sometimes run into an “unknown error” here and there that might stunt your workflow. The backup system is simply appalling. While practical in theory by letting you backup your whole website so that it can be moved to another server you run into the impossibility of actually choosing whichever path you’d like for your backup. You have to provide a UNC path that it has write permissions on. While I could overlook this total lack of common sense of not being able to backup to a local physical path, God help you if your website database is hosted on a remote server, because to backup your database, it’ll run some stored procedures from within it’s own database and you’ll soon find that your UNC path is well… unknown to that remote server where you keep your database. And then you’re stuck in a no-exit situation where you can backup the local portion of your website, but your database is stuck somewhere in limbo since it doesn’t even try to download it somehow, but tries to do everything remotely. Quite a showstopped if you ask me. Thank God that for us geeks there’s always the stsadm command line tool that seems to get the job done faster and better than the graphical interface.

But don’t be discouraged. While I think there are many more problems with WSS than I managed to find in my short 3 week experience using it, there are many upsides too. It takes care of arduous tasks so you don’t have to, while you can concentrate on doing the important stuff. It is quite well integrated with your Windows network and with Microsoft’s solutions such as Office, providing full support for documents. And I must admit it’s quite fun to work with and code for to some extent. Debugging options are ok, you can always attach the Visual Studio debugger to the aspnet process. All these said, I’m sure I’d never use WSS to create any solutions except in the exceptional case when it is expressly requested by the client. I suggest you try it out and give it a  go, maybe it’ll make your life easier and maybe the boys down in Redmond will find the time to make it as developer-friendly as it is user-friendly. It has great potential but at the same times major flaws that stop it from being a full-fledged one-stop solution to all of our business demands.