Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Doing SharePoint 2007 Development in Visual Studio 2010

I was recently asked if you could build SharePoint 2007 solutions in Visual Studio 2010. At the time of writing, Visual Studio 2010 is a Release Candidate and will launch in April. I’ve just installed the Release Candidate and I can tell you that there are two SharePoint 2007 project templates included:

  • Sequential Workflow
  • State Machine Workflow

There are no other out of the box 2007 project templates. Of course, there is a rich selection of SharePoint 2010 templates.

While it’s possible that Microsoft may add more SharePoint 2007 templates to the final product, I haven’t been able to find any mention of this in my searches. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use Visual Studio 2010 to create SharePoint 2007 solutions, just that right now you’d have to do a lot of leg work to make it happen.

Fingers crossed that we will see some community extensions (like WSPBuilder and STSDev on Visual Studio 2008) make it easier to use Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint 2007 targets.

Update: after installing the released version of Visual Studio 2010 Premium, here are the templates that are available to me:

image