New Visual Studio SharePoint Extensions Balance Good News/Bad News

SharePoint developers who use Visual Studio 2008 should be happy to hear that the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions version 1.2 (VSeWSS 1.2) was released last week. This follows the release back in February 2008 of the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions version 1.1 (VSeWSS 1.1), which had multiple new features.So, why all of the complaints from the developer community in the MSDN blog? Well, for one thing, VSeWSS 1.2 offers few new features, beyond supporting Visual Studio 2008 (and by extension, the .Net 3.5 framework, which is fully compatible only with with VS 2008). Another gripe is that 64-bit OS support is still missing, which has been a point of contention for quite some time. It sounds as if Visual Studio 2008 developers will need to wait for at least VSeWSS 1.3. for these and other enhancements.

On the positive side, there have recently been a few exciting announcements for the Visual Studio development community. First and foremost is the launch of MSSharePointDeveloper.com, a new site from Microsoft for people who are interested in learning SharePoint development. The site is packed with content, including guides to getting started with various SharePoint components, development labs, sample code, screencasts, and white papers. It's an outstanding resource. Also of note is the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint -- Developer User Guide, which is a solid introduction to the toolset. Although it's original audience was Visual Studio 2005 SharePoint developers, all of the code samples, documentation, etc., apply to Visual Studio 2008 as well, because they currently share the same feature set.

No word as yet on when or what to expect in the next release of Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint. We'll keep our eye on the developer's blog and pass along any pertinent information, because as we all know, there's nothing worse than cranky geeks.