Using Visual Studio 2010 with SharePoint 2010

Development for SharePoint 2010 using Visual Studio 2010 requires the developer to take caution and adhere to more stringent standards for the project to be a success. Although an aggressive approach may allow the developer to make great strides in a short period of time, .NET and SharePoint 2010 development is both a science and an art. Code can still cause memory leaks, applications can enter near endless loops, and simple mistakes may drastically affect SharePoint 2010’s performance. However, the resulting applications can meet a great range of business requirements, making Visual Studio 2010 the choice of many developers.

Now in its fourth generation, Visual Studio 2010 is the de facto standard for development on the Windows platforms. Although developers can take advantage of Visual Studio 2010 to develop C++ applications and other applications that are compiled down to machine code, the typical developer creates applications on top of the .NET Framework, the same framework that SharePoint is built upon. SharePoint’s use of the .NET Framework is apparent in the ASP.NET controls, layout pages, master pages, ascx controls, and aspx pages visible throughout the system’s C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions14 directory.

When developing applications for SharePoint 2010, developers typically code using familiar languages such as VB.Net or C#. Although the syntax of these two languages is different, Visual Studio 2010 compiles the code down to an intermediate language called MSIL where the code, regardless of the originating syntax, behaves roughly the same. Furthermore, code developed in different .NET projects using different languages can reference code developed in another .NET language. For more information about the .NET Framework, see http://www.microsoft.com/net/.

Visual Studio 2010 has now standardized and streamlined packaging and deployment of solution packages (WSP), an area in which the preceding versions of Visual Studio fell short. A solution package is a cabinet file with a .wsp extension that contains the application code, a manifest, and one or more directories containing application specific files. Visual Studio 2010 can deploy, activate, deactivate, and un-deploy solution packages without requiring the developer to open a command prompt or PowerShell.