| This is the first of a series of notes I will be making while attending the SharePoint Conference in Vegas. These are not intended to be complete, polished, edited blog posts. Its simply the highlights, as I saw it, from the sessions I attended. - Tools are designed to make development for SharePoint a LOT easier and a LOT more productive
- Supports Sandboxed and Farm solutions
- Provides a number of Project and Item Templates
- Provides a number of Visual Designers
- Provides a number of Workflow improvements
- Templates
- You are going to generally start with an empty project and then add the items you need as you need them
- Solution Types
- Farm Solutions = What we have today
- Sandboxed Solutions = Site Solutions
- This can be changed whenever you like
- When creating the project you specify a debug site
- Intellisense filtering stops you seeing things you can use when in Sandboxed mode. HOT
- Item Templates
- These are not complete (wonder what is missing?)
- Can use an empty template for those
- Seems to include the most popular items
- DEMO 1
- Showed a workflow
- This does look nice in the demo, hard to note it
- Deployment
- There is some logic in the deployment process which will detect any existing assets which might conflict with a new version. For example old web part files. This can be set to Automatic, or you can have it prompt you.
- Event receivers
- There is a template for these
- Wizard based creation, builds our the xml files for you
- Certainly makes things a little qucker,
- F5 to deploy when done. Nice
- BDC Designer
- Looks sophisticated, and very graphical
- You do not ever need to see the ADF XML file. Interesting.
- Read/Write, full CRUD support
- VS would be used over SPD because you cant write code in SPD
- VS could support scenarios like pulling data into one list from multiple sources
- Development Continuum
- Slide that demonstrates that:
- Visio and SPD and important and export between them
- SPD –> VS occurs via the WSP
- You can save your Site as a WSP file
- Great for Functional designers to be working with the Developers
- Great for Mock-ups. HOT
- This includes workflows
- Visio can be used to design the Workflows, but you need to get them into SPD to make them real workflows. From there they can go back and forth.
- Once you send it to VS for coding, then you cannot go back again.
- DEMO
- Showing how a WSP can be imported
- Created a SPD workflow in a site –> Saved it as a WSP.
- Finds all the declarative artefacts for importing
- This pulls in lots of stuff!
- You can then pick and choose, so you are going to want to pull in only the custom bits, not all the standard content types and fields.
- Identifies all your dependencies.
- In the end the two custom lists that were created in the site that was saved to a WSP are transformed into new features. This could get seriously out of hand with Farm features, but I guess no big deal for Sandboxed solutions
- Like the way this is going, think there is lots of potential here for increasing developer agility
- You can actually set multiple startup projects! (I think with VS2008 even?)
- Project System
- This has been completely revamped in VS 2010
- Server Explorer
- Has SharePoint connections
- Supports connections to multiple site collections
- Feature Designer
- Graphical way to build a feature
- Add items that are available
- Activation dependencies
- Looks like this is how you can re-organise your projects
- They have worked hard to ensure you dont have to get your hands dirty with XML.
- Package Designer
- Works in a similar way
- Focused at the feature level
- All drag and drop
- Options for adding other assemblies
- Packaging Explorer
- Single view, tree view, of a single package
- lets you drill into it
- Each project in a solution gets one package
- Mapped Folders
- Provide a project folder where you can store images and layouts pages
- Effectively this is just a nicer way to manage your images and layouts pages
- Helps guide people down best practice for solution artefacts. HOT
- DONT use 12 Hive use SharePointRoot instead.
- Sandbox solutions dont have a filesystem of course.
- You can create your own mapped folders, you get Images and Layouts by default.
- Creating your own SharePoint Items for VS Projects could be fun
- You will have the ability to define exactly what happens when you perform a deployment, this is slick too.
- Visual Studio is very extensible, if anything is missing, you can code it in yourself
- Worked hard to make GUID managing much easier, they use replaceable tokens in lots of places.
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