Patterns & Practices SharePoint Guidance

This guidance helps architects and developers design, build, test, deploy and upgrade SharePoint intranet applications. A reference implementation that is named the Contoso Training Management application demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and application lifecycle management challenges.

This guidance discusses the following:

Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging.
Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter, such as when to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information.
Implementation examples that are demonstrated in the Training Management application and in the QuickStarts.
How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
How to set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
How to manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.
Team-based intranet application development.

The following areas are not discussed in the current version of this guidance:

Content-oriented sites that use Web content management
Internet and enterprise-scale SharePoint applications
Multilingual SharePoint applications
Scale or security testing of SharePoint applications

Downloads	SharePoint Guidance – November 2008
Getting started	Overview. This will help you to decide if the guidance applies to your situation.
	Getting Started with the SharePoint Guidance. This is an introduction to the Training Management application.
MSDN	Pattern & Parctices SharePoint Guidance
Community	CodePlex Community Site