SharePoint Apps - If not Silverlight then…?

Question

So up until now I have written Silverlight apps and put them on my SharePoint Online pages as web parts.

If I wanted to move away from Silverlight, so that my apps could run on phones, tablets etc. what should I be thinking of using that still has the functionality to programatically access SharePoint lists and objects etc. And would allow me to use VB or C#.

And how would I put it on the page in a web part etc.?

My SharePoint is SharePoint Online.

Thanks,

JT

Answer 1

If you want to code for SharePoint Online and want your functionality to work with mobile phones, then for the moment you'll be able to develop your code in VB/C#, by creating Sandboxed solution, but instead of learning that I'd suggest you look into using JavaScript, as this is the way forward. (Sandboxed solutions are deprecated in SharePoint 2013 and may be disallowed to run code in SharePoint online)

Answer 2

Have a look at the JavaScript Client Object Model. It has almost the same structure as the Silverlight Client Object Model but is completely AJAX based.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/60348/SharePoint-2010-Client-Object-Model-for-JavaScript

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh185015.aspx

Answer 3

Another thing to note is that there will be a completely new app model in SharePoint 2013. So when you're not looking on deploying next week, you might want to take a look at that. SharePoint 2013 also has better out of the box targeting for mobile devices. There have been no announcements yet about converting current SharePoint Online environments to SharePoint 2013, but I expect that to happen somewhere in 2013.

About the sandboxed solutions, I don't expect Microsoft to say: we're not supporting them any longer so when we upgrade SharePoint Online they'll break. The upgrade for 2013 is a database attached upgrade (thus: new farm). I think for SharePoint Online that means they'll upgrade environments gradually, probably leaving it up to you when you want to upgrade (as with BPOS). My development 2013 environment still has sandboxed solution support and Microsoft has taken some effort to provide 2010 backwards compatibility, so I don't think they'll skip it alltogether. But still; for your question I'd definitely recommend checking out the app model.