When developers talk, Microsoft listens. Microsoft has worked hard to respond to worldwide feedback received from SharePoint Developers following the release of Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint (VSeWSS) in mid 2008. As a result of that feedback, top feature requests came to light, confirming Microsoft's intent to provide the developer community with market leading tools for best practice applications around the world. And across the world to New Zealand to Intergen's (yellow) door is where Microsoft went for the smarts to make the extensions for SharePoint 1.3 happen.

The pain
Quick deployment is another big win. Significant time-savings will now be possible over big projects as developers don't need to run a full deployment every time they want to make changes ­ they can simply surgically deploy individual elements.

Command line build, package and retract commands are included, enabling continuous integration and builds. Conflict errors will be reduced as a result of better Conflict Resolution dialogue. VSEWSS provides a list of all conflicts and a description of how it needs to resolve those issues, allowing the developer to proceed without running up against an error list.

Again, reduced development time is the outcome. Beyond these highlights, there is an evolution of features surrounding Web Parts, Data Lists, Content Types, Event Receivers, Templates and Modules.

Making it happen
The Intergen team turned the extensions to Visual Studio around in a matter of weeks due to a good combination of Intergen's EA people and SharePoint practice gurus.

Intergen's Clive Vermuelen sums up the synergy, saying, "On the one hand the project required EA programming expertise, but in addition it also needed really detailed SharePoint knowledge because we needed the understanding of how to bring the elements together to deploy them into SharePoint. We're extremely happy with the result, and we think developers will be excited about how the new features will save time, and ultimately money for their clients."

Intergen can point you to the Community Technology Preview available on Microsoft Connect. The final release of VSeWSS v1.3 is planned for debut mid 2009.

The gain
Microsoft was committed to evolving the SharePoint development roadmap, addressing hot button issues and requests, to bring new and highly relevant improvements to Visual Studio v1.3 features.

As long-time Microsoft partners and voted Microsoft Partner of the Year for 2008, Intergen's developers had extensive hands-on knowledge with VSeWSS and the development depth to hit the ground running. Better. Faster. Smarter.

A snapshot of new Visual Studio v1.3 features. The lack of 64-bit support has been addressed. The availability to install VSEWSS v1.3 on x64 Server OS machines running SharePoint x64 means that developers can now use environments that were previously impossible.

Good partnering produces good results
The new features available in VSeWSS v1.3 will streamline SharePoint development and that's good news for customers. "We're extremely happy with the result and we think developers will be excited about how the new features will save time and ultimately money for their clients."

For more information

Intergen
www.intergen.co.nz

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