I have some experience branding SharePoint sites through SharePoint Designer using JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, and CSS. Now I am starting a new job in which all development is Visual Studio and instead of modifying master and .aspx pages like a website, I now have to understand code behind pages, event receivers, templates, webparts, etc. None of these things are too difficult to grasp individually but staring down a large solution file with a hundred of these nodes is intimidating.
I decided to ask this question when I went to find the allitems.aspx page for a list to modify the structure of the view, an easy task in SharePoint Designer but in Visual Studio I see no lists or view/form pages.
Can anyone explain, or show me an explanation, of how all of these moving parts and pages of C# code become the SharePoint website the customer sees?
You need to look on SharePoint from the developer’s point of view. Ask you team what strategy do they use for deployment as there is several possibilities.
If they use backup/restore strategy you still can apply your
previous experience as before.
But if they use WSP’s, features and C# (or/and PowerShell) code for
deployment, i.e. create everything from scratch, you need to learn
Visual Studio. For instance schema.xml files for lists, modules for
custom css, xslt, master pages. Look books recommendation at this question and
check especially this book, it has a chapter devoted to branding
deployment as WSP.