Developer Features for SharePoint 2010

The major features for the SharePoint developer can be broken down into three main categories:
➤➤ Developer productivity
➤➤ Rich platform services
➤➤ Flexible deployment

These three areas, in turn, can be broken down into greater detail.

Developer Productivity

For developer productivity, a significant advance for SharePoint 2010 is the tooling support that

ships with Visual Studio 2010. Included with Visual Studio are a number of project-level templates

and item-level templates that you can use to create and deploy a wide array of features and solutions

to SharePoint. For example, Figure 2-1 shows the different templates available to you, which are

described in the following list:

➤➤ Import SharePoint Solution Package — This option imports a SharePoint Solution Package

(a file with a .WSP extension), the standard way of building and deploying SharePoint solutions

into your current project that can be redeployed into another SharePoint instance of

your choice.

➤➤ State Machine Workflow — This represents a workflow that is based on the system or application

state and can be deployed to SharePoint. It leverages Windows Workflow and is a special

template that enables automated deployment to SharePoint.

➤➤ Event Receiver — This allows you to create server-side code that can be called and executed

by a feature or solution. Event receivers are often created to respond to a user action (for

example, when a user adds an item to a list, an event is triggered to update a log entry).

➤➤ Empty Project — An empty SharePoint project can be used as a blank starting point for project

development. You can add lists, Web parts, event receivers, and so on, to an empty project,

and then deploy it to SharePoint.

➤➤ Module — This provides a way to deploy a specific file to a SharePoint site. It allows for the

bundling and provisioning of files for a feature. So, when the feature is activated, the files are

deployed to the specified file location.

➤➤ Business Data Catalog Model — This is used to create connections to line-of-business (LOB)

systems. This is similar to what is created by SharePoint Designer 2010 (see Chapter 8), but

Visual Studio uses a more code-centric approach for more advanced and complex connectivity

➤➤ Content Type — A custom content type (for example, a template, document, list column, and

so on) can be repurposed across SharePoint.

➤➤ Sequential Workflow — This represents a workflow that works in a sequential manner

through a set of activities and can be deployed to SharePoint. It also leverages Windows

Workflow and is a specific template that enables automated deployment to SharePoint.

➤➤ List Definition — This is used to define and deploy a list to a SharePoint site. For example,

you can define fields or columns when you create the list definition.

➤➤ Import Reusable Workflow — This is used to import a declarative workflow (only the XML

part of the declarative workflow) that has been created by SharePoint Designer 2010, and

converts it into a code workflow that a developer can then further customize.

➤➤ Site Definition — This is used to define and deploy a site into a site collection. Your site can

also contain elements such as lists or Web parts — items that are available from the Project

Item templates.

➤➤ Visual Web part — This is an ASP.NET-based Web part that you can use to build and deploy

Web parts using drag-and-drop controls. You can then write ASP.NET event handlers for

those controls.

Rich Platform Services

In terms of rich platform services, SharePoint has evolved quite a bit from SharePoint 2007. For

example, you have a rich set of UI objects that you can develop against (such as the SharePoint ribbon),

and you have a core set of SharePoint artifacts that can be used to build out your SharePoint

site

Flexible Deployment

With SharePoint 2010, you have two primary deployment options:

➤➤ On-premises — The on-premises version of SharePoint is where you or your company own

the assets on which the instance of SharePoint runs. For example, you deploy it on your corporate

network behind the firewall, you manage the hardware and updates to that hardware,

and you manage the administration of the site. Subsequently, you absorb the costs of running

SharePoint for your organization.

➤➤ SharePoint Online — SharePoint Online is a hosted version of SharePoint that Microsoft

runs for you out of its data centers. In SharePoint Online, you build and deploy your SharePoint solutions to a sandboxed environment — a ring-fenced environment that runs in

the cloud within the purview of a site collection. For example, you can build a solution that

reads and writes to a contact list within a site collection. This works on-premises, and can

equally work in SharePoint Online.

This information is taken from  "Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development"