SharePoint 2013 Explorer

UPDATE: Newer version of the tool now available here.

Here is one of the first developer utilities specifically built for SharePoint 2013. It will let you peek and poke at the internals of your SharePoint 2013 site collections, either on-premises or in the cloud.

The tool is based on SharePoint Explorer 365, read this post for the full details of its origin, capabilities and usage instructions. The changes in this new version are as follows:

• Updated passive authentication code for Office 365 Preview as detailed in this post.
• Compiled against SharePoint 2013 versions of Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll, which provide a range of additional objects, properties and methods compared to the 2010 versions (see below screenshots).
  Because of this, this version of the tool will not work against SharePoint 2010 site collections.
• Compiled against the .NET Framework 4.0, so this needs to be installed if you want to run the tool.

Here is the download, read my previous post on SharePoint Explorer 365 regarding disclaimers and such.

You can see the expanded capacity of the 2013 version of the Client Object Model by comparing screenshots of the tool compiled with 2013 assemblies with screenshots of the same tool compiled with the 2010 assemblies.

Site Collection objects and properties in 2010 Client OM assemblies

Site Collection objects and properties in 2013 Client OM assemblies

Methods available against the Site Collection in 2010 assemblies

Methods available against the Site Collection in 2013 assemblies

This expansion of Client OM capabilities in SharePoint 2013 is great news, especially for Office 365 developers. The screenshots above relate to site collections, but there are new capabilities for webs, lists, and other SharePoint objects as well. This tool, or a .NET reflection tool, provides great insights into these new capabilities.

Note that SharePoint 2013 is in Preview and is liable to change as it matures (this is especially true of the Online version), so the tool may stop working at any time. In the meantime, have fun with it!

Thanks again to Stefan Stanev for building such an easily extendible SharePoint utility and providing the source code to the SharePoint community!