4 ms·

In a way it has happened already with the XBox. After (in my opinion) winning the previous generation of console wars, they set out to ignore their main audienc

In a way it has happened already with the XBox. After (in my opinion) winning the previous generation of console wars, they set out to ignore their main audience to appeal to the ones their marketing team has decide to target. The only thing I really liked seeing from MS recently was Sharepoint 2013, which really is very good, especially for developers.

enjo 13y ago
Really? I'd actually be interested to hear more about Sharepoint. My experience with it is getting to be awhile ago, and it was VERY unpleasant. What does it do for developers now?
- electrichead 13y ago
  The single biggest thing for me was the framework for deploying "apps" through azure. You can create webparts or other bits of functionality that can be reused but hosted externally on Azure. There is a self-hosted option where the URL is a generated one but has a trust setup already; but there is also the option to use your own azure hosting but you need configure the trust yourself. One other thing I liked is that there is no more need for a SharePoint Designer - there is a new method of designing sites that is way more configurable than in the past. You can configure almost everything, but as it always is, you will find that you need to do quite a bit of research on your own to get things 100%. All in all though, it is a very solid offering from MS that nobody really talks about. One of the main pain points from the past is that everyone thought it was a CMS when really it was a document management system. Now it actually can be both. There is a talk on YouTube from the unveiling of 2013 that is well worth a watch (although it is over an hour long)
- Maarten88 13y ago
  You program "Apps" for it that work very much like Facebook Apps. It's all web standards: get an oath token with sufficient scope from the user and then use the new _api to get data in and out. .net, Azure and javascript are supported and documented best, but you can use any language and run SharePoint apps on any platform.

enjo 13y ago

Really? I'd actually be interested to hear more about Sharepoint. My experience with it is getting to be awhile ago, and it was VERY unpleasant. What does it do for developers now?

electrichead 13y ago
The single biggest thing for me was the framework for deploying "apps" through azure. You can create webparts or other bits of functionality that can be reused but hosted externally on Azure. There is a self-hosted option where the URL is a generated one but has a trust setup already; but there is also the option to use your own azure hosting but you need configure the trust yourself. One other thing I liked is that there is no more need for a SharePoint Designer - there is a new method of designing sites that is way more configurable than in the past. You can configure almost everything, but as it always is, you will find that you need to do quite a bit of research on your own to get things 100%. All in all though, it is a very solid offering from MS that nobody really talks about. One of the main pain points from the past is that everyone thought it was a CMS when really it was a document management system. Now it actually can be both. There is a talk on YouTube from the unveiling of 2013 that is well worth a watch (although it is over an hour long)
Maarten88 13y ago
You program "Apps" for it that work very much like Facebook Apps. It's all web standards: get an oath token with sufficient scope from the user and then use the new _api to get data in and out. .net, Azure and javascript are supported and documented best, but you can use any language and run SharePoint apps on any platform.