After more than seven years of doing SharePoint Development I will leave the SharePoint Business by today and start a new journey.

Over the past years, I was involved in numerous SharePoint projects from a developer’s and a consultant’s perspective. It has been a blast.

For those of you that know me in person, this is not so surprising. Over the years I’ve always tried to bring the latest and greatest technologies, frameworks and even other programming languages into SharePoint to have more fun during daily business.

Being a SharePoint Developer wasn’t always fun. Till 2013 we were forced to use older frameworks and tools to build things for customers. It was more about using Reflector to seek and find APIs that can be used to achieve XYZ… Most of the cool stuff was going on in areas like ASP.NET or Azure (to name two of them). To provide a short list of the crazy stuff, I (and of course my fellow MVP Christian Glessner) built, here a few examples.

  • Integration of PowerShell in SharePoint and Nintex
  • Integration of IronPython and IronRuby into SharePoint 2007 and 2010
  • Integrated Spring.NET into SharePoint 2010
  • Promoted Languages such as CoffeeScript to the SharePoint Community to build good client-side apps
  • Introduced various yeoman generators for SharePoint and O365 Branding
  • Opensourced ShareCoffee at sharecoffee.github.com

There are even crazier things I’ve done in the past to show that SharePoint Dev can be cool.

Right now we’ve got the O365 API, and people can start building Apps and integrate them into O365 in no-time. This is great, but especially in Germany, it’s hard to sell that cloud-based stuff in these days … There are several reasons for this — which I don’t want to discuss now — that said it’s hard to bring customers to this new world… which is frustrating. SharePoint developers will — in my eyes — build Farm Solutions (valid for a huge set of customers in Germany) for the upcoming decade. And that’s not what I want to do for the upcoming years.

In the bottom line, I’ve to say THANK YOU to all the folks out there in the world for supporting me in the SharePoint Area. It was a blast.

I’m proud to know that our sixth BarCamp in Munich will happen this weekend (see ShareCamp) which is the biggest Community Event for SharePoint in the German-speaking area. The 2015 edition of ShareCamp was also the last one for me; I’ll no longer investigate in that area because my entire expertise will change in the upcoming future. For all those friends and community members that will join the ShareCamp this weekend:

Have fun and happy coding 😀

That said, what is next

Well, I was telling my customers for a decade now that they should focus on mobile Apps consuming services such as O365 instead of backing everything into the host process itself. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to run serious projects in that area here in Germany. Therefore I’m proud to have the chance to dig into the Cross-Platform development business by joining the excellent team of Thinktecture. Thinktecture is an incredible team focusing on Cross-Platform Apps with .NET backends!

Visit our website at http://www.thinktecture.com/ or drop me a mail to get even more information and see what we’re precisely offering for your business. I’m looking forward to the next months/years and happy to work together with passionate, professional and super smart people on exciting projects!

Bridging two worlds

I think there are plenty of opportunities to bring those areas (O365 and Cross-Platform Development) together. I’ve helped to shape the O365 API by providing tons of feedback and ideas to the PG back in 2014 and by digging that deep into the API itself, I think I have a good understanding of the things going on there. I’m looking forward to helping you and your team of developers to step into that new area and build Apps for ALL platforms that integrate into Office365 or SharePoint OnPrem (if there is no other way :D).

Happy SharePoint’ing (One last time :D)