SharePoint Developers, you can uninstall VS2005 for good

SharePoint developers always have the pain of going back and forth between Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 because 2 of the most productive tools (one is SharePoint workflow project template in VS2008 and WSS3 tools for VS2005) is available in different versions of Visual Studio.

Well, that is the scenario until today the SharePoint team officially released Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 (VSeWSS) with the version number 1.2.

If the only reason you still having VS2005 in your PC is because of VSeWSS then it’s time to say goodbye and have a pure VS2008 development environment.

Download the bits here.

Office Developer Conference ’08 contents now online

The slides from ODC 2008 are made available on the OBA Central website.

The slides are categorized into a few categories:

• Architecture (those planning a full scale deployment of OBA should read this!)
• Client (incl. coverage of some lesser know product for OBA i.e. Access & Groove)
• Executive
• Server (ala SharePoint, look out for stuffs on BI and Authentication)
• Services (SOA & S+S)

One of the cool thing I saw from the slides is a 3d Silverlight webpart for Plant Floor OBA RAP (pic below).

http://www.obacentral.com/ODC

Can’t get enough of VSeVSS? Get SmartTemplate then

Jan Tielens who created the SmartPart project came up with another SharePoint project called SmartTemplate. Similar to VSeWSS, SmartTemplate ease the development of SharePoint projects by automating the creating of configurations file with wizards and tools. Further more, by integrating SharePoint Installer, a setup program is created for you as well, giving developers more automation without using STSADM to install the feature. Best of all, it is running inside VS2008!!

Download the project here, it is just v0.2 but can be used to created SmartPart and WebPart project. More are in the todo list, i.e. Event Handler and Application Page project.

Here is the demo video I download from the CodePlex page.

 

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xSb305Q30E]
YouTube – SharePoint SmartTemplate demo

Visual Studio Extension for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWWS) 1.1

Microsoft just keeps on raining goodies at Office Developer Conference 2008 that I am holding back notifications to my partners/ developers until it’s over. No wonder they got extra activities on weekends for sleepless attendees!

The new VSeWWS 1.1 just got release and there is a host of new features besides bug fixes. You still got to run it on Visual Studio 2005 but already confirmed that VSeWSS 1.2 will support Visual Studio 2008 and aimed to be released June 2008!!

1. My favorite feature – Visual Basic support !!

2. WSP view for WSP Editing – Not possible previously where you can modify features.xml before deploying to SharePoint server

3. New item templates

4. F5 no longer do IISReset but only app pool refresh, so faster debugging 🙂

You can download the installer and the user guide here. More details at SharePoint team blog.