First look at SharePoint 2010 for Developers

The past week has seen quite a bit of new information being published by Microsoft regarding Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. This is just the start, I am sure, and by the time Office 2010 is released next year, we will probably all be getting sick of hearing about it (jk). A good place to start getting a feel for SharePoint 2010 is to look at SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek videos recently posted by Microsoft.

I had a look late last week at the new features from a general perspective – see my column over at Legal IT Professionals. In this post I want to have a look at some of the new features for developers. I will give my take on what I saw in the videos, and also mention a few things that I was hoping to see but didn’t.

The Developer Sneak Peek Video covers a number of features of SharePoint 201 for developers:

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint tools
Language Integrated Query (LINQ) for SharePoint
Developer Dashboard
Business Connectivity Services
Client Object Model (OM)
Silverlight Web Part

The Visual Studio SharePoint tools are intended to improve programmer productivity when developing for SharePoint. A major new feature is the Visual Web Part Designer. As the name implies, this tool lets you visually design your web part UI, rather than coding it or using something like SmartPart. While the demonstration in the video is extremely simple, this tool should greatly improve the process of developing Web Parts for SharePoint 2010.

The support for Feature and Solution packaging seems to be greatly improved as well, and actually looks like it is a real Visual Studio tool rather than an afterthought.

Microsoft has also added a SharePoint node to the Server Explorer in Visual Studio. This allows you to look at the structure and content of the SharePoint site you are targeting without having to bounce back and forth between IE and Visual Studio.

Another big feature is the Business Connectivity Services design tools for Visual Studio. This is a set of tools for implementing BCS entities from within Visual Studio, allowing a developer to do more sophisticated BCS development than is possible from SharePoint Designer.

Moving beyond Visual Studio, there are a number of other important enhancements for developers.

One of these enhancements is the Developer Dashboard. This is a component which is enabled by a sight administrator, and can be added to any SharePoint page to support development and debugging. It provides diagnostic information regarding including the detailed page request, timing information, information on Stored procedures called, as well as details regarding resource usage, authenticated user, web part timings, etc. This should be a big help in troubleshooting issues.

Another addition is the addition of the Client Object Model, a client-side API for interacting with data on the SharePoint server using JavaScript, .NET code, or Silverlight.

Speaking of Silverlight, there is now a built-in Silverlight Web Part to facilitate deployment of rich UI components. The video shows a nice demonstration using Silverlight, the Silverlight Web Part, and the Client Object Model.

While I definitely like what I see for developers in SharePoint 2010, there are a number of things I want to see but didn’t:

The Visual Web Part Designer is great. I am curious, though, whether this tool will have any support for developing connectable web parts more easily? Creating the visual part of the Web Part is wonderful, but most useful web parts need to provide or consume connections.
Another thought on the Web Part Designer – does it have support for developing async behaviours, or does it still have to be duck-taped together?
Is there better support for development of Site Definitions, List Definitions, Content Types, etc.? This has remained a manual, tedious, and hence error-prone process. Similarly, is there support for editing of CAML for queries, etc.?
SharePoint Workflow development support. The tools for workflow development in SharePoint 2007 are “ok” as far as they go, but there remain a fair number of very manual, very “cludgey” steps that make it non-trivial to implement real-world workflows, including the mechanisms for developing and using custom ASP.NET association, initiation, and task forms.
Speaking of workflow, the execution environment for workflow in SharePoint is missing some pieces, most notably the tracking service. What has been added?
Rumour has it that SharePoint 2010 will be running over .NET 3.5, not .NET 4.0. Say it ain’t so! So SharePoint Workflow will not take advantage of the performance improvements in .NET 4.0 – what’s the point?
Does the Silverlight Web Part support connections? Or must any data flow into or out of the web part be done from within the Silverlight?

Well, those are my first thoughts on SharePoint 2010 for developers. I can’t wait to see/learn more over the coming months.