SharePoint Features in Visual Studio 2010

As you probably know, Visual Studio 2010 contains a lot of great features and project templates for SharePoint developers. Below is a short overview for some of the SharePoint development related features and project templates.

Configurable deployment

With all new SharePoint project templates you can leverage new configurable deployment feature which lets you configure the way you want to deploy or retract your project. Besides using provided, out of the box deployment steps (Run Pre-Deployment Command, Run Post-Deployment Command, Recycle IIS Application Pool, Retract Solution, Add Solution, and Activate Features) you can use SharePoint extensibility to create your own, custom deployment steps and deployment configurations.

Sandboxed and farm solutions

Some SharePoint projects can be deployed either as sandboxed or farm solutions. Sandboxed solutions run in a secure and monitored process that has limited resource access and with farm solutions user must have SharePoint administrator privileges to run or deploy the solution. 

A sandboxed solution is a new concept in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation that allows site collection users to upload their own custom code solutions. A sandboxed solution uses a subset of the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace. These objects are marked in the object model to show their availability in a sandboxed solution. All sandboxed solutions are stored in a solution gallery. In addition, there are facilities provided to help server farm administrators monitor and validate solutions that have been uploaded to these galleries. Performance can be monitored by measuring CPU execution time, memory consumption, and database query time. You can also monitor other aspects of operation including abnormal termination, critical exceptions, unhandled exceptions, and data marshaling size. 

Extending SharePoint Tools

Even though Visual Studio 2010 contains a set of project templates you can also extend them. You can create extensions for projects, project items, define your own project item types and create deployment extensions. You can read more about extending SharePoint tools on MSDN.

Feature and Package Designer

Feature and package designers give you the ability to customize features in your solution and with packaging designer you can customize which features are getting deployed and how. More about feature and package designer is here.

SharePoint Explorer

SharePoint Explorer is a new tool window that gives you a view into your SharePoint server. You can get a hierarchical view of lists, sites and workflows on your SharePoint server.

SharePoint Project and Project Item Templates

The following SharePoint specific project templates and project item templates are available in Visual Studio 2010:

Project Templates

· Empty SharePoint project

· Visual Web Part project

· Sequential and State Machine Workflow

· Business Data Connectivity Model

· Event Receiver

· List Definition

· Content Type

· Module Project

· Site Definition

Project Item Templates

· Empty Element

· Web Part

· User Control

· Application Page

· Association Form

· Initiation Form

· Business Data Connectivity Resource Item

· List Instance

· List Definition From Content Type

· Global Resources File

Besides above mentioned project templates, there are two import project templates for importing .WSP file contents and importing reusable workflows:

· Import Reusable Workflow

· Import SharePoint Solution Package