Read about 4 new features introduced in SharePoint 2013 at last night’s launch event.

Remote Event Receivers

These are massively useful! By registering a remote end-point you can now call either a one-way or two-way event receiver. Visual Studio helps set this all up by creating the stub event code and also the CAML to allow you specify the Url to call. This now means that applications like DocRead will be able to exist in Azure and receive notifications as items in libraries change.

Demo : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/sharepoint/fp123633

OAuth Support

We have known this was going to be supported for a while, but now it’s official. Apps now get the ability to be given “permissions”, much in the same way as users / groups. This is the same concept as we have all grown used to with “apps” that use our twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. It also means that we don’t have to always under the context of another user when executing code.

Video : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/sharepoint/fp123633

Following, Sharing and Liking

You can now follow users, documents and sites. Once you follow “something” you can join a discussion about it and take part in it’s mini Activity Feed. All the feeds are immediately available via the the new Velocity Cache. From a developers perspective, you can now access the cache from custom code.

App Model for Developers

As an End-User I like this one, as a developer – who is used to writing lots and lots of code against the SharePoint Object Model – I think it’s going to be as frustrating as Sandbox solutions. The App Store is going to allow users to pick “Apps” to include in their SharePoint sites. However, developers aren’t allowed to run any server-side code so it must all be done with HTML, JQuery and OData. I guess I need to try this out to see what’s possible, but my first impressions aren’t good.