Visual Studio 2011 Beta - What's new for SharePoint 2010

Now here it comes ,  It's 00:20 AM and I just installed VS 2011 beta version on my SP Virtual machine. I know that this is bit late to install this beta since MS has released it quite few days back , but I believe in better late than never so posting this just to share some thoughts on whats new available in beta for SharePoint developers.

Before going forward I would like to make a point here - I really liked the installation screen while installing VS 2011 , thought it took more than 30 minutes but doesn't matter. you can also try to see the innovative (because I seen this first time while installing any MS product) installation UI. you can download the beta copy of VS 2011 at this - http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us

What's new for SharePoint?

Here is the screenshot which shows you the list of available items while adding to SharePoint 2010 project type

 

As you can see in image above , there are few options which are new in VS 2011 beta.

No More pain to work with schema.xml of list definition

Lets see the option to create List using new option.

When you select the list option and select add - VS  2011 gives you the screen to select the template for your list , by default it gives you to choose from the default blank list , document library and task list template.

However it also gives you control to reuse the existing list templates which are already present on your target site. (the site to which you will be deploying the solution).

Next , after selecting the list template and display name of your list , click finish and here comes the interesting part.

Thought VS adds the same structure in the solution explorer like we used to see in VS 2010 , the List Definition XML , List Instance and a feature to package and deploy this as single unit , but now with VS 2011 there is significant improvement in the rendering of complex structure of List Definition's schema.xml , VS 2011 shows you in well formatted UI where you can really play around adding new list columns , adding and setting default content types of list as well as work efficiently with list views.

As you can in the Image above , there is systematic way to display the columns , views and list. in columns tab you can see the available list columns and here you can add the list columns directly just with the help of few clicks , there is also a content type button defined where you can associate various content types with the list , like -

Now in the Views section - you can define the views as well as view settings in UI like

and finally in the list tab you can play around list instance's properties like List URL  , List description like -

and you are done , just right click the solution and deploy , you will have your list created with all defined settings.

In part 2 of this post , will explore some more new features.