Well the MS SharePoint 2009 conference is over and life is slowly returning to normal. A couple of days away from SharePoint to restore my equilibrium and I’m now back to SharePoint 2007 and the real world.
But what of SharePoint 2010? When can we see it in all it’s glory. Well Steve Ballmer announced that the Beta 2 release would be sometime in November as they were doing last minute testing internally in Microsoft. During the conference, all of the SharePoint web pages were switched over to the new version and reports coming out suggest no major problems. So fingers crossed for an early Beta 2 in November.
The conference for me was all about soaking up the changes to development in SP2010. I didn’t really focus on any of the admin sessions at all as I’m planning to download and watch them on my long journeys to work over the next few weeks. So what does SP2010 bring to us Devs?
Well the big story is the much improved integration with Visual Studio 2010. (Beta 2 available now) which ships with an absolute ton of SharePoint 2010 project templates from Web Parts to Event Receivers, List Definitions, Content Types etc.
And the biggest win for me.. ONE TOUCH DEPLOYMENT!! Yes.. hit F5 and your project deploys to your test server with nary a hiccup and just a minor bit of configuration during the project set-up. Gone are the days of configuring your DDF files and your WSPs (Well once we convince all of our clients to switch to 2010 that is!!)
So my top 5 improvements (i reserve the right to get more excited about others as time unfolds):-
- One touch deployment for testing
- Automatic creation of the WSP (This should encourage more solution deployments)
- Visual Webpart designers (Think using a User Control without needing Son of Smart Part)
- Content Types that can be deployed and updated
- Vastly improved Tableless design
Over the next few weeks I’ll be playing with Beta 1 with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (If they play nicely together) and hopefully will be rearranging this list and probably expanding it. Beta 1 is still under NDA, so nothing that hasn’t been mentioned at SPC09 will be raised, but hopefully Beta 2 won’t be far around the corner.
Paul.
