Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint

Jason Zander just announced support for SharePoint in Visual Studio 2010 at TechEd Emea. For those still working with Visual Studio 2005 - take a look at Visual Studio Extensions for WSS 1.1 (VSEWSS 1.1) - or VSEWSS 1.2 when you are using Visual Studio 2008. Some interesting features for SharePoint developers - (taken from Paul Andrew's blog)

• Server Explorer for SharePoint viewing Lists and other artifacts in SharePoint directly inside of Visual Studio. Apparently they extended the current Server Explorer to make it SharePoint aware.





• You can import a SharePoint WSP to create a new solution




• Added a new web part project item and showed the Visual web part designer which loads a user control as a web part for SharePoint. Well we already had the Smartpart but is nice that finally it is provided within Visual Studio 2010 itself.




• Showed adding an event receiver for SharePoint and using the wizard to choose the event receiver and to just create a source file with that event receiver.




• Added an ASPX workflow initiation form to a workflow project and showed how this workflow initiation form has designer capability.
• Showed the packaging explorer and the packaging editor which lets you structure the SharePoint features and WSP file that is created. This is one of my dislikes with the current VSEWSS tools - they are not flexible enough with regards to building your SharePoint Solution packages - therefore I uses WSPBuilder

Apparently they also added support for BDC schema editing directly into Visual Studio 2010 if you look at the available project types.

Definitely take a look SharePoint Development with Visual Studio 2010 on Channel 9 for more info.

Remark: these features are not available yet in the current download of Visual Studio 2010 CTP.