Hi All,
[First: I’ll spare you the obligatory “excuse for lack of blogging” post and just get into the detail of what I’ve been up to!]
I’ve been pretty impressed by the out-of-the box support for SharePoint developers in Visual Studio 2010. Microsoft have done a fantastic job of not only improving the tools from the 2007 versions, but making them extensible and open such that the community can drop by to fill in the gaps.
To this end, I’m excited to announce the Alpha release of SPVSX – a collection of extensions for improving on and extending the out-of-the-box SharePoint tooling support in Visual Studio 2010.
What’s In The Alpha?
The Alpha release includes the following functionality:
Deployment - Quick Deploy (similar to Copy to 12 and Copy to GAC in old-school WSPBuilder and VSeWSS 1.3)
- Quick Deploy Custom Deployment Steps and Configurations
- Project and Solution-level Quick Deploy (without changing deployment configuration)
- Copy to SharePoint Root at File and SharePoint Item (SPI)-level (right-click in Solution Explorer)
- Auto Copy to SharePoint Root when saving a file (e.g. auto deploy a change to an ASCX)
- Auto Copy to GAC/BIN when building a project
- Restart IIS
- Recycle app pools
- Attach to IIS worker processes
New item templates - Custom Action (basic)
- Hide Custom Action (basic)
- Custom Action Group (basic)
- Delegate Control (basic)
Server Explorer extensions - Web part gallery listing
- Import Content Type into current project (stub - full feature to come in beta)
- Display Custom Action Groups (stub - full feature to come in beta)
- Display Custom Actions (stub - full feature to come in beta)
- Display Hide Custom Actions (stub - full feature to come in beta)
Where Are The Bits?
The easiest way to install SPVSX is to browse the Online Gallery within the Extension Manager (Tools Menu) of Visual Studio 2010. Simply search for SPVSX, click “Download” then “Install”. App Store for DEVS, eat your heart out!
You can also find them in the Visual Studio Gallery, or visit our CodePlex site to peek at the source. It’s all open, and it’s all free.
The usual disclaimer applies: this is an alpha release, so is expected to have a few gremlins. Please do provide feedback, suggestions, and bug reports via the CodePlex site, and if you’re interested in getting involved in coding or testing, please let us know.
Credits and Next Steps
This release is the culmination of a month’s worth of late nights particularly between myself (Quick Deployment bits) and Wes Hackett (Item Templates and Explorer Extensions), a colleague at Content and Code. Thanks also to Glyn Clough and Martin Hatch for chipping in with ideas and icons. As a team, we’ll continue to develop on, blog about, and provide support for the tooling in the upcoming months. In other words, we don’t want this to be one of those “CodePlex graveyard” projects, and we hope you’ll give it a try and provide feedback to help us make this work.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be blogging and tweeting (#spvsx) in more detail about the various features, as well as the process of extending the SharePoint tooling itself.
Merry Christmas, and Enjoy!
:) Matt