Introducing SharePoint Apps
- 1/15/2013
- Understanding the new SharePoint app model
- Understanding SharePoint app model architecture
- Packaging and distributing apps
- Conclusion
Let’s begin with a bit of history so that you can understand why and how the Microsoft SharePoint app model came about. It was back with SharePoint 2007 that Microsoft first invested to transform SharePoint technologies into a true development platform by introducing features and farm solutions. With the release of SharePoint 2010, Microsoft extended the options available to developers by introducing sandboxed-solution deployment as an alternative to farm-solution deployment. With SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has now added a third option for SharePoint developer with the introduction of SharePoint apps.
When developing for SharePoint 2013, you must learn how to decide between using a farm solution, a sandboxed solution, or a SharePoint app. To make this decision in an informed manner, you must learn what’s different about developing SharePoint apps. As you will see in this chapter, SharePoint app development has several important strengths and a few noteworthy constraints when compared to the “old school” approach of developing SharePoint solutions for SharePoint 2010.
As you begin to get your head around what the new SharePoint app model is all about, it’s helpful to understand one of Microsoft’s key motivations behind it. SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 have gained large-scale adoption worldwide and have generated billions of dollars in revenue primarily due to companies and organizations that have installed SharePoint on their own hardware in an on-premises farm. And, whereas previous versions of SharePoint have been very successful products with respect to all these on-premises farms, Microsoft’s success and adoption rate in hosted environments such as Microsoft Office 365 have been far more modest.
The release of SharePoint 2013 represents a significant shift in Microsoft’s strategy for evolving the product. Microsoft’s focus is now concerned with improving how SharePoint works in the cloud, especially with Office 365. Microsoft’s primary investment in SharePoint 2013 has been to add features and functionality that work equally well in the cloud as they do in on-premises farms.
Understanding the new SharePoint app model
The move from SharePoint solutions development to SharePoint app development represents a significant change in development technique and perspective. However, Microsoft is not making this change just for the sake of making a change; there are very valid technical reasons that warrant such a drastic shift in the future of the SharePoint development platform.
To fully understand Microsoft’s motivation for beginning to transition away from SharePoint solutions to the new SharePoint app model, you must first understand the problems and pain points of SharePoint solutions development. Therefore, this section will begin by describing the limitations and constraints imposed by SharePoint solution development. After that, the discussion turns to the design goals and architecture of the new SharePoint app model and addresses how this architecture improves upon the limitations and constraints imposed by SharePoint solution development.
Understanding SharePoint solution challenges
The first problem with SharePoint solutions development is that most of the custom code written by developers runs within the SharePoint host environment. For example, managed code deployed in a farm solution runs within the main SharePoint worker process (w3wp.exe). Managed code deployed by using a sandboxed solution runs within the SharePoint sandboxed worker process (SPUCWorkerProcess.exe).
There are two primary reasons why Microsoft wants to get rid of custom code that runs within the SharePoint environment. The first reason has to do with increasing the stability of SharePoint farms. This one should be pretty obvious. Eliminating any type of custom code that runs within the SharePoint environment results in lower risk, fewer problems, and greater stability for the hosting farm.
The second reason has to do with the ability to upgrade an on-premises farm to newer versions of SharePoint. SharePoint solutions are often developed with full trust and perform complex operations. These solutions are often tightly bound to a particular feature set, which means that they might not move gracefully to the next version of SharePoint. Fearing a complete rewrite of dozens of solutions, many customers delay upgrading their SharePoint farms.
Microsoft has witnessed many of their biggest SharePoint customers postponing the upgrade of their production on-premises farms for months and sometimes years until they have had time to update their SharePoint solution code and test it against the new version of Microsoft.SharePoint.dll. Because this is a problem that negatively affects SharePoint sales revenue, you can bet it was pretty high on the priority list of problems to fix when Microsoft began to design SharePoint 2013.
Another significant problem with SharePoint solution development has to do with security and permissions. The root problem is that code always runs under the identity and with the permissions of a specific user. As an example, think about the common scenario in which a site administrator activates a feature from a SharePoint solution that has a feature receiver. There is a security issue in that a SharePoint solution with a feature receiver is able to execute code that can do anything that the site administrator can do. There really isn’t a practical way to constrain the SharePoint solution code so that it runs with a lesser set of permissions than the user that has activated the feature.
Most SharePoint professionals are under the impression that code inside a sandboxed solution is constrained from being able to perform attacks. This is only partially true. The sandbox protects the farm and other site collections within the farm, but it does not really protect the content of the site collections in which a sandboxed solution is activated. For example, there isn’t any type of enforcement to prohibit the feature activation code in a sandboxed solution from deleting every item and every document in the current site collection.
Another issue with sandboxed solutions is that there’s no ability to perform impersonation. Therefore, custom code in a sandboxed solution always runs as the current user. This can be very limiting when the current user is a low-privileged user such as a contributor or a visitor. There is no way to elevate privileges so that your code can do more than the current user.
Farm solutions, on the other hand, allow for impersonation. This means a developer can elevate privileges so that farm solution code can perform actions even when the current user does not possess the required permissions. However, this simply replaces one problem with another.
A farm solution developer can call SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges, which allows custom code to impersonate the all-powerful SHAREPOINT\SYSTEM account. When code runs under this identity, it executes with no security constraints whatsoever. The code can then essentially do whatever it wants on a farm-wide basis. This type of impersonation represents the Pandora’s Box of the SharePoint development platform because a farm solution could perform an attack on any part of a farm in which it’s deployed, and it must be trusted not to do so. As you can imagine, this can cause anxiety with SharePoint farm administrators who are much fonder of security enforcement than they are of trust.
In a nutshell, the security problems with SharePoint solutions stem from the fact that you cannot effectively configure permissions for a specific SharePoint solution. This limitation cannot be overcome, because the SharePoint solution development model provides no way to establish the identity of SharePoint solution code independent of user identity. Because there is no ability to establish the identity of code from a SharePoint solution, there is no way to configure permissions for it.
The last important pain point of SharePoint solution development centers around installation and upgrade. The installation of farm solutions is problematic because it requires a farm administrator, and it often requires restarting Internet Information Services (IIS) on all the front-end web servers, causing an interruption in service. Although the deployment of a SharePoint solution doesn’t involve these problems, it raises other concerns. Business users often have trouble with the process of finding and uploading sandboxed solutions in order to activate them. Furthermore, a business user has very little to indicate whether or not to trust a sandboxed solution before activating it and giving its code access to all the content within the current site collection.
Of all the issues surrounding SharePoint solution development, nothing is more prone to error and less understood than the support for upgrading code from one version of a SharePoint solution to another. Even though Microsoft added support for feature upgrade and assembly version redirection in SharePoint 2010, almost no one is using it. The required steps and the underlying semantics of the feature upgrade process have proved to be too tricky for most developers to deal with. Furthermore, the vast majority of professional SharePoint developers have made the decision never to change the assembly version number of the assembly dynamic-link library (DLL) deployed with a SharePoint solution. That’s because creating and managing the required assembly redirection entries across a growing set of web.config files is just too painful and error prone.
You have just read about the most significant pain points with respect to SharePoint solution development. Here is a summary of these points.
- Custom code running inside the SharePoint host environment poses risks and compromises scalability.
- Custom code with dependencies on in-process DLLs causes problems when migrating from one version of SharePoint to the next.
- A permissions model for custom code based entirely on the identity of the current user is inflexible.
- User impersonation solves the too-little-permissions problem but replaces it with the too-many-permissions problem, which is even worse.
- SharePoint solutions lack effective support and easily understood semantics for distribution, installation, and upgrade.
Understanding SharePoint app model design goals
The SharePoint app model was designed from the ground up to remedy the problems with SharePoint solutions that were discussed in the previous section. This means that the architecture of the SharePoint app model is very different from that of SharePoint solutions, which represent SharePoint’s original development platform. This new architecture was built based on the following design goals.
- Apps must be supported in Office 365 and in on-premises farms.
- App code never runs within the SharePoint host environment.
- App code programs against SharePoint sites by using web service entry points to minimize version-specific dependencies.
- App code is authenticated and runs under a distinct identity.
- App permissions can be configured independently of user permissions.
- Apps are deployed by using a publishing scheme based on app catalogs.
- Apps that are published in a catalog are easier to discover, install, and upgrade.
You have now seen the design goals for the new SharePoint app model, and you understand the motivating factors behind them. This should provide you with greater insight and a better appreciation as to why Microsoft designed the SharePoint app model the way it did. Now, it’s time to dive into the details of the SharePoint app model and its underlying architecture.