SharePoint 2010, web parts and you…
Posted by Brian Gough on October 24, 2009
Well SharePoint Conference 2009 is over and man there is a lot of SP 2010 information being released. I already have a long list of items to blog on to keep you as informed as I can.
In a previous posting I touched on one means of creating SharePoint web parts using Visual Studio 2010 based on an article by Steve Fox, VS 2010 – disappointment.
Everything in that article still holds true an my opinion has not changed, but I did want to give you more info on VS2010.
There will basically be two “types” of SP web parts, “Visual Web parts” and “Standard Web Parts”. Visual web parts are with Steve Fox describes, in which you create a web user control ( .ascx ), wrap SP code around it and have it deployed as a web part. This is the only way to use VISUAL studio’s drag-and-drop process for creating “web parts”.
You will still have the ability to create “standard web parts” by manually writing the code for each form control ( labels, buttons, etc.. ) just like you have had to for every previous version of Studio.
Its not all bad though as Visual Studio is SharePoint aware now so we will even have a server explorer that will show us all the SharePoint members for the site you connect to.
VS has improved on the process for creating WSP’s for deploying your solutions. Packaging solutions and adding event handles has improved greatly as well. This is a greatly improved process over VS2007.
So, there are a lot of very nice changes in VS2010 that will make developing for SP2010 a much smoother process for most of what you may want to create. For some of your more complex web parts though, you are not going to see much improvement I’m afraid.
Also, keep in mind that VS2010 improved process for creating “Visual Web parts” and and much of its other “improvements” can only be used for developing against SP2010. You ca use VS2010 to create web parts and code for SP2007, you just wont be able to use the new and improved capabilities. Another fail in my opinion.
In spite of the areas I call “fails” there is a lot to like about the development story for SP2010 and VS2010.
More to come so stay tuned!
Brian
