Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tools Extensibility

One of the key factors determining adoption of developer tools is whether you can make the tool do what you want. When picking the right tool for the job you should at least consider three things. First of all, the tool should generally follow development best practices, making it easy for you to ‘get things right’ without thinking about it. Next, since you are unique (and yes, beautiful too, that’s another story though) a tool should be configurable to a high enough degree so that you can adjust the tool to the work and not the other way around. Finally, you should be wary of tools that only cover a small percentage of your needs. Otherwise you’ll require multiple tools, which will most likely overlap and not integrate all that well.
One key ingredient to achieving great tooling is tool extensibility. For the SharePoint tools found in Visual Studio 2010, this has been a clear message. All the awesome functionality delivered to SharePoint developers through this popular IDE is built upon an extensibility model that is also available for you to customize and extend. For SharePoint this is especially important given the large number of complex things you can do with the product and the wide variety of needs resulting from these rich capabilities. In this session, you will learn about this extensibility model and how you can make use of it to adapt the tools to your specific needs. Come and take a look at how you can create new SharePoint Project Item templates, how to extend existing items, and how to integrate with the SharePoint Explorer. Find out how to customize the F5 experience with custom build steps and deployment configurations. All in all a vital skill to have to achieve maximum SharePoint developer productivity, and we all know we could use a bit of that!

This session was presented by Wouter van Vugt during SharePoint Connections 2010 in Amsterdam.

Wouter is a Microsoft MVP and independent expert on Office and SharePoint technologies. He has focused on SharePoint Foundation as a developer platform, wrote the world’s first book on Open XML and is an author for MSDN. Wouter is a trainer with Critical Path Training, with which he successfully authored and delivered SharePoint 2010 workshops to hundreds of professional software developers from Microsoft as well as other ISVs and System Integrators that have participated in the private beta as part of the TAP, Metro and Ignite programs.

Check out Wouter’s SharePoint 2010 Development tools project on CodePlex