Microsoft Visual Studio to boost

Developers building solutions based on Microsoft's SharePoint
collaboration and business process platform will gain expanded support
in the planned Visual Studio 2010 development environment, which will
feature templates and an extensibility API, a Microsoft official said
in a blog on Thursday.

Currently, developers can use Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 to develop
for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0, said S. "Soma" Somaseger, senior vice president of the
Microsoft developer division, in his blog. Developers also can use
Visual Studio for Windows SharePoint Services or third-party tools, he
said.

"In Visual Studio 2010, we?re going to expand SharePoint support in
two key areas. First, Visual Studio 2010 will deliver a broad set of
project templates, designers, and deployment infrastructure that will
make any .Net developer instantly more productive on the SharePoint
platform," Somasegar said. "Second, we are exposing an extensibility
API that will continue to foster the ecosystem of third-party
developers who create development tools and technologies."

Visual Studio 2010, Somasegar said, will boost developers via project
and items templates. "You'll be able to use these to quickly create or
update SharePoint elements, such as list definitions, list instances,
site definitions, workflows, event receivers, Business Data Catalog
models, and content types," he said.