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Service Application Framework

Applies to: SharePoint Foundation 2010

The Service Application Framework provides developers with the ability to build scalable middle-tier shared services that are hosted in SharePoint Foundation 2010. Service Application Framework applications can take advantage of load balancing and a common management and deployment experience in SharePoint 2010. The Service Application Framework is available as a public API in SharePoint Foundation 2010 for third parties to build and manage services, service instances, and service applications.

Service applications can be tied to a single farm or shared across farms. Entire farms can be dedicated to service hosting, allowing for centralized shared computing investments for very intense services such as Web analytics or business intelligence.

A familiar example of a service built on this framework is SharePoint Server search. SharePoint Server search runs on multiple application servers in a SharePoint farm and provides its data to any Web service.

Prerequisites for the SharePoint Developer

Service Application Framework touches many areas of SharePoint development, from the service model to claims-based identity, to Windows PowerShell.Creating efficient Service Application Framework applications requires that a programmer be familiar with SharePoint development and that they work closely with their site collection administrators.

At a minimum, developers should be familiar with the following:

  • SharePoint Administration Object Model

  • Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

  • Features

  • Windows PowerShell and the SharePoint Management Shell

In This Section

Service Application Framework Architecture

Administering Service Applications Using the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell

See Also

Reference

Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration

Concepts

Server and Site Architecture: Object Model Overview

Using Features in SharePoint Foundation

Windows PowerShell in the SharePoint Management Shell