Visual Studio 2010 extensibility projects for sharepoint 2010

Today at the SharePoint Summit in Montreal, I am presenting a session on Silverlight and SharePoint. As a part of this session, I am announcing the release of a project that my team and I have been working on over the past few months. I am announcing the release of the SharePoint 2010 Extensibility Projects for Visual Studio 2010: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vsixforsp.

These project templates leverage the extensibility model for Visual Studio 2010 to provide you with some augmented capabilities for SharePoint development. Specifically, they provide three extensibility templates:

1. Silverlight Web Part

2. SharePoint Ribbon

3. OBA Deployment

The Silverlight Web Part enables you to build friction-free Web parts that host Silverlight applications. All of the plumbing is wired up for you, and you even have some default code spit to get you started.

The SharePoint Ribbon template enables you to customize the SharePoint 2010 ribbon. Using an XML-based approach, this template provides you with a set of XML and JavaScript files so you can add customizations into the ribbon.

The OBA Deployment template enables you to create custom Office documents (using VSTO) and then automatically deploy these as a content type to a document library. It’s a great way to very easily get custom templates to your users.

Each module includes a VSIX file, short video walkthrough of how to use the templates, and a help document with some additional information in it.

Thanks to Paul Stubbs and Donovan Follette for helping drive this. We will rev these with a number of improvements for the SharePoint launch timeframe.

I hope you get some use out of these, and I hope these inspire you to create your own custom Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint 2010.

Happy coding!

Steve