What developer features excite you the most for WSS 4.0 / SharePoint 2010? [closed]

Question

There's been a lot of developer frustration working with SharePoint but we all hope Microsoft has been listening. With that in mind...

What updated and new features for developers excite you about working with WSS 4.0 and SharePoint Server 2010?

One answer per feature please so the community can vote on each one.

Ninth

Thanks guys :) will pass this along to the team – Tetany

Answer 1

Official LINQ support. Seriously, CAML is stupid, and replacing it with LINQ in most cases will be a blessing.

Intercommunion

+1 I totally agree. CAML has always bugged me and it will be great to get LINQ instead – Wongawonga

+1, though it's a real pity that it uses the same deficient engine under the hood (so e.g. joins are client-side rather than server-side). – Swenson

Keep in mind - LINQ or no LINQ, list "joins" are never joins. Lists can be many things, but they are decidedly not tables. – Gillispie

Just to make things clear to anyone that might be confused, CAML isn't going away... it is still used to provision features, but CAML queries can now be easily replaced by LINQ queries. – Klemens

Answer 2

The new Client Object Model (OM), which will make it a lot easier writing SharePoint apps running on remote machines. It looks a lot easier than working with the current set of inconsistent and cumbersome Web services.

Padova

This should really help new devs as well, because web services is where a lot of them start. – Ninth

Answer 3

I would have to say clean XHtml output. That has been bugging me for the 3 years i've worked with sharepoint.

Galven

Answer 4

Development support on Win 7 / WS08R2

You no longer have to do your development on Windows Server. You can use Win 7, Vista, or WS08R2.

Klemens

Answer 5

Dev tools support

SharePoint is now a first class citizen in Visual Studio. You can throw away WSP Builder and Sharepoint Manager, both great tools for SP2007

Klemens

Answer 6

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) - In MOSS it was known as BDC - Ability not only to read the data from External data Store, but to write back. As show in the demo video there will be a List of type for External Data, that will let you to connect External data store and automatically the Add/Edit form gets rendered.

Pyles

Does anyone know if they've enabled easy use of databases which utilise composite keys? – Rimola

This seems to me like one of those features that sounds great in theory but once you try and implement updateable external data in 'the real world' it will in most cases become a quagmire of technical difficulties and political stonewalling – Pyretic

@Pyretic :Very true, we were so excited about this coming in 2010,But probability of using it out of the box is always not fair. – Pyles

Answer 7

My personal 'want' is the developer dashboard!

Rimola

Answer 8

The sandbox.. being able to deploy custom code to SharePoint Online and other hosted solutions will skyrocket SharePoint usage

Miyasawa

Answer 9

Powershell support

Anything you could do with STSADM can now be done by using the fully power of powershell. There will be feature parity between the two.

Klemens

Answer 10

Correlation ID's for errors

Small change, but lets you search the logs folder for a correlation ID A correlation ID for errors. You can use this ID to view the error in the Logs folder.

Klemens

Answer 11

XSLT based Rendering for the List Views

Pyles

Answer 12

Visual Web Parts: Design-time experience for web parts. No need to dynamically create controls or use kludgy user control workarounds. This should ease the pain ASP.NET developers find getting up to speed with SharePoint.

Ninth

Answer 13

They say they've streamlined the performance so I'm anxious to see the results of that. I don't know a user or developer who enjoys using SharePoint. Prior to 2010 it's the most bloated website I've ever used.

Ingra

It will be interesting to see if this is client-side performance or server-side performance. Virtualised server appears to have hefty requirements: twitter.com/sahilmalik/status/4445176046 – Ninth

Answer 14

Ability to add Custom List Forms for the List using the InfoPath. Also you can Specify the validation logic for the Fields.

Pyles

Answer 15

More control over Sync Event Handlers:

Currently in 07 We have an option to cancel the event set the ErrorMessage that will be displayed in the Plain Boring Page of SharePoint. It has been improved in MSS 10 ,now that we can set the redirect Page to which we want to redirect the user to.

Pyles