Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

Appendix A. Using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Extension for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

By Adam Buenz

The Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (VSeWSS) enables SharePoint developers to economically and efficiently build the most customary solutions that target and leverage the SharePoint platform. Typical SharePoint development often consists of repetitive, tedious chores when trying to build the foundation for custom solutions such as Web Parts, Site and List Definitions, content types, and deployable packages for distributing customized content across an enterprise environment. SharePoint as a modular development framework implies that several habitual tasks must be performed when constructing new pieces of functionality, in essence, providing the groundwork to integrate and make use of programmatic assets available in the SharePoint environment. VSeWSS seeks to make the life of a SharePoint developer much more painless, truncate development chores, and provide resourceful methods for deployment of robust SharePoint solutions. In essence, VSeWSS is a way to empower a SharePoint developer with enhanced, integrated development tools that offload some of the overhead that is typically required when building against the SharePoint platform.

As an example, consider the groundwork typically required for building the most common solution SharePoint developers tackle, a minimal custom SharePoint Web Part. Under normal circumstances, to ...