SharePoint Himadrish

Visual Studio 2010 beta has been launched and beta can be downloading from Microsoft download center http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=75cbcbcd-b0e8-40ea-adae-85714e8984e3&displaylang=en

Good news is, Microsoft is expanding SharePoint support feature in VS 2010. Visual Studio 2010 will deliver a broad set of project templates, designers, and deployment infrastructure that will make any .NET developer instantly more productive on the SharePoint platform. In VS 2010, there seems to be a great extension of API that will continue to foster the ecosystem of third party developers who create development tools and technologies.

In VS 2010, developers can able to work with single list or the instances of the list, site definition, content types, work flows, event receivers and BDC models in more flexible way. Server explorer is stretching itself to display SharePoint farm and site structure just like SharePoint designer implementation. Soma Segards described VS 2010 and its integration with SharePoint is his webblog.

Bad news is, SharePoint development is still pretty hard and lots of manual steps we have to execute to implement solution. The basic showstoppers still is in debugging and implementation process. Still today, win 2003 is required for developers for testing and implement SharePoint solution. Developers cannot develop and test solution on XP or VISTA. Design issues with remotely implement solution in testing or production box.

Microsoft can consider providing SP ENVIRONMENT TEMPLATE in next visual studio release.
Once developer will choose this template while creating the project, dummy SharePoint environment will be setup automatically. It will add all the related DLL and other sort of feature and data to run the SP site in debugging. Hitting F5 will able to create a Team Site and allow developer to test the new implemented solution (i.e. work flow, event receiver, features etc) over there, just same as we run any temp web site while debugging ASP.NET web application.

Other approach could be allowed to install and run mini SharePoint environment at VISTA or XP. Looks like, developer can install the mini SharePoint application at their client machine, develop and build the solution, test on their machine, and build up the solution packages for testing in the staging box.

Check the Reza Chitsaz for VS 2010 features.

Cool