By José Cortes

A little background: with SharePoint 2007 you had the option of installing the portal in WS2003 or WS2008, either in their 32bit or 64bit options, and you could choose between the core system WSS 3.0 or the full upgrade to MOSS 2007. In all of these cases you were able to use .NET framework 2.0 and 3.0, and with some patches you could even use the 3.5 version.

Now with the new SharePoint 2010 (read as “SharePoint twenty ten”) we have a new name for WSS 3.0, and it is Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. It is still the heart of the platform and provisions the basic services of SharePoint that allows you to deploy your custom templates and instantiate them in your lists, workflows, sites, etc.

On top of the foundation we have the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 which evolves directly from MOSS 2007. It still has two versions: standard and enterprise, giving us the benefit of choosing the services that fit the needs of our Clients.

The new SharePoint 2010 platform works with the .NET Framework 3.5 and it can be mounted on WS2008, W7, or Vista Operative System in their 64bit versions. The 64bit restriction will mean that companies using SharePoint2010 will have to invest more on hardware, but in the long run everyone will profit from the upgraded performance and the extra focus Microsoft will give to maintain and support a single code base. I’d like to comment on the option to install SharePoint2010 in a Client Operative System like W7 and Vista which is a great addition for developers without a full server environment. Now we can finally develop in our own computer without the need of a virtual machine.

There are more improvements for developers:

Higher integration between SharePoint2010 and Visual Studio 2010 providing out of the box assets to work immediately in workflows, events, files, business connectivity services, content types, lists, sites, web parts and more. It will also support browsing your SharePoint implementation using the Server Explorer for SharePoint sites and elements inside of Visual Studio 2010.

Another updated tool is the SharePoint Designer 2010 (SPD), now no longer a tool for simple page customization, the designer will be able to edit all types of SharePoint assets. The assets modified with the designer can be packaged and deployed immediately to SharePoint 2010 or to Visual Studio 2010 for further coding, making it easy to work on the finer details of the asset and allowing a faster deployment cycle. The workflow creation inside SPD allows custom workflows without the need of custom code, and in the case of extra details they can be imported into Visual Studio for further improvements. You can also create workflows in MS Visio and import them directly into SPD.

We finally get the Developer Dashboard, where you will see the performance and details of every component executed, allowing you to quickly identify issues in web parts or widgets. 

I highly recommend taking a better look at SharePoint 2010 as a developer, all these interesting changes and additions to the SharePoint development environment will be integrated to Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server making our life easier and our code faster.