Sharepoint and Visual Studio 2005

I found this interesting post from Scott Guthrie. Specifically, this section I found particularly interesting as I'm currently looking at Sharepoint and future integration with other projects.

"Sharepoint Server Support


We've done a lot of work to integrate ASP.NET 2.0 with the next release of Sharepoint that ships with Office 12 next year. The new version is built entirely using the new feature of ASP.NET 2.0: WebParts, Master Pages, Themes, Site Navigation, Membership, Roles, Personalization, Localization, Data Controls, etc.


One of our goals with Visual Studio is to enable great tool support for building Sharepoint solutions. Today with VS 2003 this is fairly limited (you can pretty much only create a web-part control as a class library). One of the design goals of the new VS 2005 web project system was to enable great Sharepoint support, and enable directly opening and debugging Sharepoint solutions. Going forward we will support creating and editing new pages in running Sharepoint servers, support adding code-behind logic to pages, creating application logic, customizing workflow, building and adding new webpart controls, and debugging the finished solution."

SharePoint Applications by Microsoft

It looks like Microsoft is trying to make SharePoint more attractive to enterprises with some additional (30) templates. An EWeek article can be found here. The templates themselves can be found on Microsoft's Technet SharePoint Services site. Of interest (maybe only to me) is that a colleague of mine, Peter O'Kelly from Burton Group, is quoted in the EWeek article.