Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint tools

Visual Studio 2010 includes support out of the box for the most common types of projects that you may want to build with SharePoint 2010 as well as new features for more easily defining features, solutions, and wizards to walk through the most common settings for each project type. Visual Studio 2010 has the following project templates built in:

• Empty SharePoint Project


• Web Part


• Sequential Workflow


• State Machine Workflow


• Business Data Connectivity Model


• Event Receiver


• List Definition


• Content Type


• Module (Files)


• Site Definition


• Import Reusable Workflow


• Import SharePoint Solution (WSP) Package

Each project is either C# or VB.NET project that contains particular initial project items. You can add typical C# or VB.NET artifacts as well. In addition Visual Studio 2010 includes additional SharePoint project items as items that you can add to any of your projects:

• Web Part


• Workflow Association Form


• Workflow Instantiation Form


• Application Page


• List Definition from Content Type


• List Instance


• Empty Element


• User Control

The project types and project items in Visual Studio 2010 are shown in Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2 – SharePoint Project Types in Visual Studio 2010.

Figure 3 – SharePoint Item Templates in Visual Studio 2010.

Each project wizard guides you through the process by asking what site you want to use to deploy and debug your solution. It also asks whether the result of the project will be deployed as a sandboxed solution as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4 – Project wizard connects the development
environment to a SharePoint instance

Visual Studio 2010 also includes support for viewing SharePoint 2010 sites through the Server Explorer. You can now use Server Explorer to look at all of the SharePoint settings for sites, lists, content types, workflow associations, and other objects. This allows you to navigate and view SharePoint sites. It simplifies the process of checking code against the implementation in the system because all of the implementation details available to you in the Visual Studio 2010 environment. For document libraries and lists it also gives you quick access to an artifact you view in the Server Explorer with a link to the SharePoint Web UI. Figure 5 shows the Server Explorer with a SharePoint site open.

Figure 5 – Server Explorer allows you to navigate SharePoint.