Understanding WSS 3.0 in five minutes

Posted on August 20, 2008
Filed Under Development, Software, microsoft | 1 Comment

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Introduction
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is essentially a web application built to run on a Windows Server 2003 operating system. It requires a web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), .NET 2.0 Framework and SQL Server database installed on Windows Server 2003. WSS 3.0 can be viewed to contain two parts – a platform and a solution that runs on the WSS 3.0 platform.

Architecture
WSS 3.0 main architecture is a 3-tier application. Tier 1 is the Web Front End. It is what a user sees in the browser. Tier 2 is the Application tier and it is responsible for dynamically generating content. Tier 3 is the Database tier and this tier is responsible for storing and returning data to tier 1 and tier 2.

Deployment
WSS 3.0 can be deployed to a single server or onto multiple servers (a server farm) depending on the an organization’s requirements.

Example of small farm – One Front End server and a dedicated SQL Server
Example of a medium farm – Network Load Balanced Front End Servers and a Clustered SQL Server
Example of a large farm – Network Load Balanced Front End Servers, Clustered SQL Server, Content Database and a Configuration Database.

Development
WSS 3.0 is built upon ASP.NET 2.0 and you can create web parts for WSS 3.0. Web Parts in WSS 3.0 are ASP.NET pages. A Web Part is a web control that inherits from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts namespace.

Development IDE: Visual Studio 2005
Design IDE: Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007