With Visual Studio Community 2015 you get a full Visual Studio version for free! In following post you can learn how to download it and – for SharePoint – how to install the Office Developer Tools.
Info!
For SharePoint development you need an additional tool – the Office Developer Tools. There is one for Visual Studio 2013 and one for Visual Studio 2015. Both versions launch a Web Platform Installer pointing to the entry for the Office Developer Tools.
2013: You needed the “Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013”
Back in 2013 the Visual Studio Community 2013 version replaced the free Expression version of Visual Studio.
Additionally you needed the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013. This link starts a download of the file OfficeToolsForVS2013Update1.exe. If you don’t thrust a download from the URL aka.ms (which is indeed a Microsoft URL) you can have a look at this Microsoft Announcement, the link Download the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 – March 2014 Update points to the same file. On this StackExchange page you can find further information.
With Visual Studio Community 2015 the tools were renamed from “Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013” to “Office Developer Tools”. As a user wrote on this SharePoint Community page you can download the Office Developer Tools here. Click on the button Get Office Developer Tools.
The “Get Office Developer Tools” link already points to these updates. As you can see in the comment from user Sean Laberee about Update 1 the link is correct even though it downloads OfficeToolsForVS2015.exe which is the same as what you used in August (first release) and November (Update 1). It also launches the Web Platform Installer pointing to the entry for the latest update of the Office Developer Tools.
As Tobias wrote
One word. WOW.
Boy am I glad I chose to work with Microsoft technologies back in the day when I had to choose the direction for my professional career.
🙂
[Update: reduced the uncommon name “installer”, replaced with “Office Developer Tools”; information added about the Update 1 and 2]
At the moment I read a lot about SharePoint configuration since I’m doing initial SharePoint configuration tasks. Here are two useful blog posts I have found.
Top 10 SharePoint Configuration Mistakes
This blog post lists the top 10 SharePoint 2010 configuration mistakes (applies for SharePoint 2013 as well). I recommend to read this post before start doing basic configurations! 🙂
Besides the well-known ‘don’t use the SharePoint configuration wizard’ it names 9 more configuration mistakes such as Default SharePoint Database Settings which slows down SQL performance (and therefore SharePoint as well).
Also very useful – not only for initial configuration but for configuration management in general – is following article: SharePoint Configuration Management: Guidelines and Tips.
It shows how to track changes of SharePoint configuration and which benefits such a approach has.
Back in the days when I was working for a big automotive supplier company (~ 200.000 employees) the company intranet pages where about to be built. We saw that one department named the pages with organization charts Organisation, the other Who We Are, the third Organization Charts. The team made the suggestion that we should standardize these site maps to gain usability (according to Jakob Nielsen a good usability shows the same content on the same place in the same way).
Standardized Intranet Site Map
So we set up a standard intranet site map. Here’s an abstract example:
Explanation
Home – Start Page
Products / Services – Choose one; if you are a human resources department you would choose Services
Your Content 1 – Content that the content owner / employees wishes to expose (e.g. Download)
Your Content 2 – Content that the content owner / employees wishes to expose
Who We Are – Organization Charts
Where We Are – Approach and Site Plan
Site Map – Site map
Contact – Head of department, its assistant and the webmaster of the intranet pages
Note that some pages are mandatory and some are optional.
We found out in surveys that the first thing users do on the company intranet pages is to use the search function – and then the site map -, so we placed the search field at the very top of the pages and made Site Map mandatory.
Size and Sorting
Another great finding from Mr. Usability Jacob Nielsen 🙂 was that content should be structured in 7 to 8 section, not more. So we decided to propose 8 sections.
To show the same content on the same place we used a trick. Since Content Management Systems don’t let you sort your CMS content folders we forced them by using numbers as a prefix.
So a typical CMS folder structure looked like this:
So now the site map and the (internal) CMS folder structure are the same. Note that after the 10 comes 20, not 11: so you are much more flexible. For example you can insert an additional folder with the prefix 15 – New Additional Folder to sort it between Home and Products / Services.
This new standard for intranet site maps became mandatory for all intranet pages and it worked for years and years.
As this concept was so successful I tried to organize my files in the same way – and it worked way better than expected, see Part 2:
In following excellent blog post you can find basics about planning SharePoint architectures: is it a small farm or a big one? Do I say 3-tier or 2-tier for a certain architecture?