SharePoint 2010 Development is (Slightly) Better

Let’s be real for a sec.  Developing on the SharePoint 2007 platform is more than a bit of a pain.  Despite all of MS’s and other folks efforts, it is just complicated.  It is basically impossible to reliably and cleanly develop for SharePoint 2007 and not have SharePoint running on the same machine you are running Visual Studio on.  Well, that hasn’t changed in SharePoint 2010, sadly, but what HAS changed is articulated well in this article my colleague Trent found located here via Wictor Wilen’s blog.

The main enhancement Wictor talks about is what I have set up in my development environment right now – SharePoint 2010 (which is 64 bit only kids) running on my local Windows 7 setup.  I won’t say that SharePoint screams on my local machine, but then again, it is a laptop, but couple MOSS 2010 with Visual Studio 2010 (still in almost RTM for quite some time now) and you have a very nice little setup.

By the way, I’ll be doing a whole series someday soon on Visual Studio 2010 and all the goodness that makes MOSS development better – now if they could just get remote development figured out!