Hi All,
In the last couple of months, there’s been a hive of activity around tooling for SharePoint 2010 developers, much of which has been fuelled by the fantastic extensible model the Visual Studio team has given us.
First out of the block in this space (to my knowledge) was Waldek Mastykarz, with a variety of different extensions including a parameterized deployment step, and some funky Server Explorer additions. Then, just before Christmas, we announced SPVSX – SharePoint 2010 Visual Studio Extensions, a collection of extensions built by myself and colleague Wes Hackett, with our key features being several new Project Item templates along with some comprehensive Quick Deploy and Auto Quick Deploy options. Finally, a couple of weeks ago Wouter van Vugt announced his awesome SharePoint Dev Tools, which among other things include a Sandboxed Visual Web Part, SharePoint References tab, and additional Quick Deploy options.
In a testament to the power of the SharePoint community, the four of us have got together over the last couple of weeks and realised the potential benefits in merging our efforts, both in order to avoid duplicating functionality as well as to provide the highest quality set of development tools possible. We’ve also realised that our individual versions were quite closely aligned: we are all incredibly passionate about improving developer productivity, for new and experienced SharePoint developers alike.
To this end, it is my pleasure, in conjunction with the other members of the team to announce the Community Kit for SharePoint: Development Tools Edition! For those of you who like acronyms, CKS:DEV is our preferred short form, and please follow and tag us on twitter as #cksdev. Our project site is up now at CodePlex: http://cksdev.codeplex.com/, and we also have a space on http://www.communitykitforsharepoint.org/dev. Happy times!
Why the Community Kit?
Shortly after the 2007 wave of products hit, the Community Kit for SharePoint and its various releases (such as Enhanced Blog Edition) were a fantastic resource for both extensions and reference projects/accelerators, with some great ideas coming out of it. However, I think it’s fair to say (without meaning any disrespect at all to the previous teams!) that in recent times there hasn’t been much output from CKS, and there is the perception among many I’ve asked that the ongoing development and usefulness of CKS has stagnated a little.
For the 2010 wave, the Community Kit is back again, but with a renewed focus on quality and ongoing development/support. As it became clear that the Community Kit team shared our general vision, it made a lot of sense for us to not only merge with each other but also come under the Community Kit banner. There’s some fantastic work already underway in the CKS 2010 initiative, and it is our pleasure to be a part of it.
Next Steps for CKS:DEV
We’re currently in the process of merging and consolidating our various code bases into a single tool, and will shortly be providing an initial release that contains mostly the same functionality as can be found in the individual releases linked above. In the meantime, you can continue to download those individual releases and evaluate their use for SharePoint 2010 development.
After the initial release, we’ll look to prioritise the huge list of ideas with a general goal of having the ultimate tool out in line with the RTM of SharePoint 2010. For this, we need you! – please give us any and all of your suggestions for Visual Studio enhancements and extensions that will improve productivity for SharePoint Developers via the Discussion Board on the CKS:DEV CodePlex site.
We’ll also be expanding the team as we move forward, and at this time it’s also my pleasure to welcome Todd Bleeker and Paul Schaeflin on board, two MVPs who hopefully need little introduction. As a team we’re crazily excited about taking over the world with these tools, and at the end of the day, helping make SharePoint development easier, more consistent, and dare I say it: fun.
:) Matt