What SharePoint development concepts are the hardest for ASP.Net developers to understand?

Question

I'm trying to put together SharePoint 2007 (and, eventually, 2010) training materials for experienced ASP.Net developers, and having done SharePoint for years, I don't really remember where the worst sticking points were at the beginning - not to mention the amount of Googlable SharePoint content is greater by an order of magnitude than two years ago.

That said, what SharePoint concepts are the hardest to grasp, and/or what parts of SharePoint are esoteric enough to be non-obvious to a newbie SharePoint developer just diving in?

Answer 1

My list of things hardest to grasp are:

• Code access security and all the other security features
• Difference between site/application pages and Customized/Uncustomized pages
• CAML in both queries and all the definitions
• What's already in SharePoint so you don't reinvent the wheel

• Giving up control.

  You don't control which web parts are on a page and how they are connected. You should just make them possible to reuse

  You don't control which list are on a site or which fields they contain

• Lack of support for multiple languages
• Don't dispose SPWeb and SPSite if you get them from SPContext.Current
• delegate controls

Other things which are new but seems to be easier to understand are:

• Solutions/features
• All the placeholders in masterpages