I was one of the lucky few that had a very early opportunity to meet with the product team that builds the SharePoint project system in Visual Studio 2010. One can only be impressed with the work that was done to enable SharePoint developers more than any other tool currently in use. I was happy to learn that the SharePoint development environment was built around the core concept of extensibility. Meaning you are able to bridge any gaps and tune the environment to your needs. Great stuff!
Since then I have been spending my evenings building the toolset that will further enable SharePoint developers world-wide. With added features to discover SharePoint content using the new SharePoint Explorer, new and exciting templates that make it easy to author solutions and many enhancements to the deployment of your solution into your testing environment.
May I present the SharePoint Dev Tools. Version beta 1 is ready for your approval. And I believe it will exceed your expectation! Some of the exciting features that you find within this advanced toolset are summed up below. You can go over to the project site and download the beta.
One of the first areas that has been extended is deployment. Out of the box Visual Studio 2010 is capable of retracting / redeploying your solution packages. The DevTools provide X-Copy deployment and solution upgrades on top of that. Along with many other deployment steps you have the tools you need to lower the round-trip time for small changes in your codebase. Go to the site and check out the video!
Next are some of the very exciting templates that you can use. One that I am particularly happy with is the Sandboxed Visual Web Part. This template allows you full visual design of a Web Part, while allowing it to be deployed into the solution sandbox (which does not allow ASCX files to be deployed). With SharePoint Dev Tools you can, and in a totally supported way! Also don't forget the Linq To SharePoint integrated template. Just change one XML file and get your proxies regenerated immediately. No need to leave your comfort zone. Think of it as an Office Business Application for SharePoint Developers, and SDBA J.
Finally there are numerous enhancements to the Visual Studio environment. For instance, you can find the SharePoint tab on the Add Reference dialog. Prime Visual Studio real-estate! Here's a screenshot:
As you can understand there is way too much to talk about for this single blog post. So much more good stuff to build! For now, please download and let me know anything that you find should be added. Or even better, join up with the project and add features yourself. I intend for this project to be the only toolset that SharePoint developers install outside of Visual Studio 2010. You can help make it just that!
Hope it helps!