SharePoint 2010 Tools Extensibility

Visual Studio 2010 allows you to extend the SharePoint 2010 tool support by creating custom extensions, this way you can for example create custom SharePoint Project Items (SPI’s) which are not available out of the box.

There are already some interesting examples out there of theses extensions and what’s all possible

• Extend the functionality available on the SharePoint Explorer nodes and the available menus – Imtech Get SPMetal Definition extension – there’s a complete list of Imtech Visual Studio Extensions available on Visual Studio Gallery
• Create new SharePoint Project Templates – SharePoint 2010 Extensibility Projects with Silverlight and SharePoint project template, SharePoint Ribbon project template and OBA deployment project template.
• Extend the Visual Studio context menu’s for standard and custom SharePoint Project Items (SPIs)
• Provide extensibility enable access to the SharePoint Server API from within Visual Studio

A number of extensions are also grouped within the CKS:Development Tools Edition on Codeplex (Source code available on Codeplex) – these are currently being rewritten to work with Visual Studio 2010 RTM.

If you have some other interesting extensions – please add a comment.

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