SharePoint 2010 New Developer Tools

Today I was continuing the process of learning about SharePoint 2010  and one of the areas that I focused on was all the new tools that have been added for Developers.

SharePoint Tools for Visual Studio

• New SharePoint explorer (in Server Explorer) - view into site collection on local farm with nodes for features, lists, etc in site collection.
• When creating projects for SharePoint 2010 there are project templates. Deploying these automatically builds solutions package.
• Most of the tools for Visual Studio were available through a combination of Visual Studio Extentions for WSS, WSP Builder from CodeProject and other tools. Now these are all just built into Visual Studio so it is more seamless and complicated.

SharePoint Designer

• New UI based on SP Objects rather than virtual folder/file tree like 2007 - This should make it much easier to find what you are looking for.
• Can easily see relationships between objects
• Can now export work done in SPD to wsp files that can be imported into Visual Studio project. 
• Standard approval workflow is now a customizable SPD workflow.
• In 2007 workflows were not really reusable. In 2010 can now create reusable workflows.
• New Workflow designer interface
• Can prompt for workflow variables and use those variables in the workflow 

Developer Dashboard - This looks like it will be a great addition. Turning it on will enable troubleshooting issues. I found this post that gives some good detail on it.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Blogs/GetThePoint/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=8d9e2a99%2Df288%2D47c2%2D916b%2D2f32864f7b82&ID=457&Web=5e4647a0%2De7d0%2D4626%2Db71c%2Db1ff06402465