SharePoint 2010 for developers

Today I saw a sessions talking about the new stuff SharePoint 2010 is offering for developers. Developers, besides IT Pros and end users, is one of the main three audiences the SharePoint 2010 tries to target.

In this post I will give you a quick overview of what you can expect. Until the beta comes out, I can not really test these features and take screenshots but once it's out you can expect many posts showing these new features in detail.

As we already knew, SharePoint is now completely 64 bit. The software just needs a lot of ram making the availability for 32 bit systems an incorrect choice. It would also double the testing efforts of the SharePoint development team.
Developers can now install SharePoint in Windows 7 or Windows Vista SP1. There will not be a pre install software checker available for these client OS's but Microsoft will provide a complete installation guide and handy PowerShell scripts you can use to ease the installation.

Visual Studio 2010
* You can now use web part, BDC and workflow designers. The workflow designer is an extension of the already existing designer in VS 2005/8.
* Microsoft has made the packaging and deployment procedure a lot easier. Of course everybody uses WSP builder right now. Microsoft has taken this idea and extended it. Creating a very custom WSP (with external resources, features, dll's, ...) is now very easy and can be done using a simple wizard. This wizard still allows you though to edit the feature XML itself.
* As I described some posts ago, the server explorer allows you to browse as many site collections as you want. This feature is read only but can be extended to fit your needs.
* More Team Foundation Server integration, allowing you to add your projects to source control right from creation.
* As described yesterday, sandbox solutions allow you to run solutions in a sandboxed environment with limited resources. The sandbox solution is a new option in VS 2010. The solution will run in its own process so it can be killed easily without harming the rest of the system. There are limitations though in what functions you can use. You will not be able to provision files to the layouts folder and you cannot use the RunWithElevatedPriviliges.
* a lot of BCS (Business Connectivity Services) support (more on that later)

SharePoint Designer 2010
Microsoft really listened to the developers and the speaker admitted that SharePoint Designer didn't really help you doing extra stuff with SharePoint. This has changed in the new version. Besides a coplete facelift (introducing the ribbon interface), you can now do really great additional stuff with this tool.
* BDC entities: allowing you to work with external data in SharePoint. This is extendable in any way.
* List schemas
* Custom actions
* Approval workflow designer
* Improved workflow designer and page editor
* "Save site as a template" now can be saved as a WSP
* I already talked about the developer dashboard. It has to be turned on with stsadm using this command: stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer -dashboard -pc -ondemand.
* LINQ for SharePoint, allowing you to query the datasources you defined for using with the BCS. With stsmetal you can create a class file which contains classes for your datasource which can then be used to work with the data.

Rich platform services
BCS can get its data from web services or for example from a custom .NET entity, which represents a custom datasource.
You can create a BCS Model (new VS template) to completely customize the way SharePoint communicates with the datasource. For each operation (ReadList, ReadItem, UpdateItem, ...) you can provide custom logic to do the job.
List improvements: just a few are lookup can now get information from multiple columns and data input validation/uniqueness if possible by using formula's (like in Excel).
* You can use XSLT for SharePoint and external lists.

New data access technologies
REST: ADO.Net data services, web service, ... return ATOM feeds.

Events
Some new events were added like the after-synchronous event which is fired just after the update of a list item's properties and just before the user actually sees the new data.

Workflows
A lot of improvements on this side but the side disappeared before I could write everything down. Anyway, you now have site workflows which are viewable on site collection level, it's all based on .NET 3.5 and initiation forms can now be created into Visual Studio. This was possible before but it's now completely integrated.

Ribbon and dialog framework
The framework that takes care of the ribbon interface an the dialogs (screens coming on top of the main screen with, for example, detailed information) are completely extendable and based on a javascript API and of course a lot of AJAX is used.

Silverlight 3
There is a Silverlight 3 web part where you can directly load XAP files, an out of the box media player and it's also used for the UI for creating lists and sites to make it all more flashy (ok, maybe the wrong adjective :) ).