First looks on some new SharePoint 2010 stuff

For developers, there's now Windows 7 and Vista support. Just so you know.

SharePoint as a portal to external data

Microsoft is really pushing forward the idea that you can also use SharePoint as a gateway, a portal to other backend systems. They want to make it really easy to show data, which resides in some backend system, in SharePoint. In SharePoint 2007, you could use the BDC but its successor, BCS (Business Connectivity Services), will prove to offer much more. It will offer CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) and Enumerate operations from and to almost any kind of backend system. This works closely with 'External Content Types', which are defined using the new SharePoint Designer 2010. They define the datasource.

The external data can then be shown in a new type of list, the 'External List'. As said before, CRUD operations on the data are possible. You can even, for example in the case of contact information, connect to this list via Outlook and have the same CRUD operations available. The datasource will be updated accordingly as well as the external list.

Visual Studio 2010

You can download beta 2 from here.

The Visual Studio team has included a lot of new templates to ease the SharePoint development. You now can use templates for things like site definitions, content types, BCS models and visual web parts. There's also more Team Foundation Server support and you can see an overview of your SharePoint site directly in Visual Studio via the Server Explorer.

With visual web parts, a web user control is now automatically included in the template allowing you to drag and drop all available web controls so it's easier to create the web part GUI.

The developer dashboard can now be accessed on every page giving you more information about the custom web parts that are running on that page. You can see things like stack traces, which stored procedures SharePoint calls and how long each event (OnLoad, Render, ...) takes. This makes it much more easy to track the source of problems should they arise.

Sandbox solutions

You can now write these kind of solutions in Visual Studio. They are ideal to install in a sand box environment using the new solution manager. You can upload WSP files in each site collection. Each WSP solution will use resources. A maximum of resources can be set by the administrator. If this solution is causing problems, its resources can be immediately killed providing more control.

I will soon try to post screenshots and demo's to really show you what the new capabilities can be used for.