Recently Richard diZerega (whose blog you should be reading) wrote a post called SharePoint Sandbox isn’t Dead…UserCode is wherein he explained that the use of sandbox solutions for declarative provisioning via CAML with features is not deprecated but that the use of procedural code within the sandbox user code host is deprecated. This got some folks talking because none of the official Microsoft docs make this clear.
Today I was part of a large email thread where Iouri Simernitski from the Visual Studio Tools for Office team said the same thing. When asked if that was the official word he said that it was and that this fact was not secret or subject to any NDA’s – we should feel free to share this information publicly.
So, if you have a sandbox solution and you want to maintain it going forward in a supported way, keeping your modules, fields, content types, list instances, etc. in CAML is an option. You can migrate the procedural code to CSOM, JSOM, or REST as needed. It won’t be compatible with the Office 365 marketplace but it will be supported.
Author: Doug Ware
