As I mentioned in my last post, at the recent SharePoint 2011 conference, I attended a number of sessions where Visual Studio played a major role. Andrew Connell articulated design patterns around using SharePoint with Windows Azure, Ted Pattison showed patterns around jQuery, HTML5 and oData, and Eric Shupps used the performance testing tools in VS2010 to show the impact of performance tweaks.
In all of the sessions mentioned above, reference was made to add ins, extensions, or other tools that make working with SharePoint and Azure a great deal easier. I took note of most of them, and in the process of summarizing them, thought that I should amalgamate them with my own current list of dev tools, and post it here. Extensions can and should be installed via the extensions manager in Visual Studio, and I’ll note them below.
| Cloudberry | Utility for working with Azure BLOB Storage. Makes moving files to/from blob storage simple |
| Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools* | Adds a sandboxed Visual Web Part item template and other enhancements. |
| CKS Development Tools for SharePoint* | Community led effort that includes many Tools and templates for SharePoint development |
| CAML Intellisense for VS2010* | Adds Intellisense to VS2010 for those of use still stuck with CAML |
| Visual Studio 2010 Silverlight Web Part* | Project Template for writing Silverlight web parts – both full trust and sandboxed supported |
| Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010 SP1* | Adds Intellisense for HTML5 and CSS3 to VS2010 |
| SharePoint Timer Job Item* | Supports the creation of administrative timer jobs in SharePoint 2010 |
| SharePoint 2010 and Windows Azure Training Course | Training course to get up to speed on working with SharePoint 2010 and Windows Azure |
| jQuery Libraries | Main libraries for working with jQuery |
| jQuery UI Library | UI controls for use with jQuery |
| jQuery Templates | Add in for the templating of controls in jQuery |
| Modernizr | Open source project to allow older browsers to work with HTML5/CSS3 elements |
*Available through the Visual Studio Extension Manager
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