There’s a lot of buzz nowadays about moving to Office 365 and using the App Model to extend and customize the platform. However, I know a lot of folks aren’t even considering Office 365 just yet, so I was wondering how are you developing “Apps” internally?
Are you using Full Trust Farm solutions? Or, are you starting to create Apps internally? I am guessing the decision points will be based on the fact that Farm Solutions are far quicker to develop, but harder to migrate in the future. Whereas “Apps” are slow to develop but set you up for a potential move to Office 365…
Love to hear your thoughts…
Not everyone is thinking about O365, but I believe lot of enterprises are thinking and developing Apps for SharePoint 2013. Having said that I personally feel that the APP documentation and support over the msdn is very Less due to which App Development becomes time consuming.
Some of the Important areas which should be highly documented :
1. SharePoint Hosted or Provider hosted? Which should be used when?
2. Is Provider Hosted good model for O365?
3. Lot of Functionalities are not achievable by JS Model hence people have to move to Provider Hosted with CSOM, there should be strong recommendations and alternates for each item?
I am in the process of building a series of SharePoint hosted and on-prem provider hosted apps to meet some key requirements for my client.  I personally found the  Full trust deployment a bit tedious so I prefer the whole debug , publish add to app catalogue ALm flow
Having said that, it takes a while to know when to use CSOM or REST and when would it be appropriate to go for provider hosted verses SharePoint hosted. Also async calls debugging are not always easy.
 Out of interest it would be good to some tooling in VS2013 or TFS 2013 that say
- build with unit tests
- published automating provider ids, keys, certificate location etc.
- add or update app in  catalogue
- remove and update instances of the app in the content pages.
- email people and say to report fixes and new features
Tend to do new projects as apps. The old ones stay as it is, unless they need to be migrated.
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Thanks! So are you saying you do build Apps internally or that you still use Full Trust Solutions? (Sorry it’s early in the morning and I am slow today!)
Right, we are shifting dev to the app model.
As you mentioned, there are concerns regarding migradability, moving to the cloud, having a consistent approach to write on-prem and cloud apps, avoid IISReset, increase farm performance and stability as no server side code is hosted under the farm, having less issues with patches, updates and the whole ALM.
That’s it, hard to argue and find argument to shift new solution dev from server side to apps.
