Datasheet

Visual Studio
With Visual Studio (VS) 2010, there is a major jump ahead for SharePoint developers. Previously, VS
did not have much SharePoint development functionality and you had to download the community -
supported Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. With VS 2010, you can
browse your SharePoint environment from the Server Explorer to quickly see your lists, libraries,
content types, workfl ows, and other SharePoint artifacts. A visual Web Part Designer frees you from
having to hand code HTML to add visual elements to your web parts. An entity modeling tool works
with the BCS technologies that were discussed earlier so that you can model your business entities,
write your business logic, and connect SharePoint to your backend systems. Finally, VS integrates
SharePoint development into a team development environment with support for Team Foundation
Server and easy deployment using the new Web Solution Package format, which is discussed next.
Web Solution Packages
To make it easier to package and deploy solutions, SharePoint 2010 improves the Web Solution
Package (WSP) format so that it is supported across all tools, allowing you to export your site
through the browser, SharePoint Designer, and Visual Studio. This means that you can quickly
upgrade or downgrade your solutions between the tools, depending on the person working
on the solution or the tool required to build the solution. In addition, SharePoint Online, the
Microsoft - hosted version of SharePoint, supports this format so that you can move solutions from
on - premises to the cloud without having to change formats or rework the package.
Developer Dashboard
One of most common culprits of poorly performing SharePoint sites is poorly performing code,
whether the problem is bad .NET code, bad database calls the .NET code makes, or coding errors
that cause excessive CPU, disk, or memory utilization. Tracking down and fi guring out where the
issues are in the code was a laborious process in the 2007 release. SharePoint 2010 introduces a
new developer dashboard that allows you to see all the calls made on a page right inside of the user
interface. Those calls can be ones that SharePoint is making or they can be your custom code. By
looking at the call stack, response times, and utilization, you can quickly uncover where your code
is performing poorly and try to fi x it.
WHAT ’ S NEW IN COLLABORATION/SOCIAL COMPUTING
Collaboration and social computing are two of the fastest changing technologies in the industry.
Looking back just a few years, you ’ ll note a number of technologies in this space did not exist, such
as social tagging, microblogging, and the APIs that support these technologies. SharePoint 2010
adds new capabilities in these areas, but this space is not done innovating, so at some point you may
have to build your own social capabilities on top of SharePoint 2010 to take advantage of future
technology advances in this area.
Enhanced Blogs and Wikis
SharePoint 2007 introduced blog and wiki capabilities to the SharePoint product. The most
interesting piece of the blog and wiki capability was the integration with the rest of the SharePoint
What ’ s New in Collaboration/Social Computing
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