Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements

Visual Studio 2010 offers many enhancements in Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, and Visual F#, Office system development, and leverages improvements in .NET Framework 4 that are beyond the scope of this chapter. For developers familiar with Visual Studio 2010 or other integrated development environments that might access SharePoint, some highlights are as follows:

• A new client object model allowing for code to be run on a client that was once relegated to running only on the SharePoint server.

• REST APIs for standards-based XML over HTTP communication with SharePoint.

• LINQ support for integrated, object-like access to SharePoint data from familiar .NET languages such as C# and VB.Net.

• Sandboxed solutions are solutions safely deployed to a SharePoint site and limited from doing harm to the farm through code access security (CAS). This has obvious implications for multitenancy hosting environments.

• Improved monitoring through timer jobs, which can be scheduled to run as often as every minute for a specified time span.

• New service application framework designed to support applications that were once reserved only for the components of the SSP.

• Import, modify, and extend solution packages (.wsp).

• Develop SharePoint solutions with SharePoint project type templates and SharePoint project item templates.

• Design association and initiation forms for sequential and state workflows.

• Aggregate and integrate backend data by using Business Data Connectivity (BDC) models.

• Create web parts and application pages for a SharePoint site.