Paul Andrew talks about the new Developer functionality in SharePoint 2010 in a webcast on the new SharePoint 2010 site. The is also a download of 2010  (Technical Preview) Developer Documentation too.

The webcast goes through and shows the new SharePoint integration with Visual Studio 2010 which I’m hoping will be available in the next public beta as it got missed out of the first. Paul also seems to concentrate along time on the BDC stuff which I believe is because it’s not heavily been used as it’s always been too hard.

They push a few things:

• Only use WSPs! yes really!
• Use VSeWSS…”to get used to VS2010 integration”…sorry boys WSPBuilder is a gonna in their eyes
• Go 64bit!…just use Hyper-V or VMWare as Virtual PC won’t play

It looks like the developer product team have listened hard to the community (see the Ultimate SharePoint Developer Tool), here are the things mentioned in the webcast:

• Developer Dashboard
   
• New SharePoint User Interface
   

• New SharePoint Ribbon

  
• List Edit screens

• List View screens
  
• Editing page more AJAX’y
  
• Use of AJAX MOdal Dialogs
   
• LINQ2SharePoint
  
• Deployment Configurations – more configurable deployment steps within Visual Studio
  
• Nicer way to customise manifest that are autogened
   
• Lots more support in Visual Studio
  
• 
• Visual Design of Web Parts – hooo rah!
  
• Rich Platform Services
• Silverlight Web Parts
  Paul demos the Silverlight Web Parts and says “I won’t do much with design”…it does annoy me to be honest…he could have shown off some designer supplying the design up front and him just doing development…if it is that easy…they should promote it. I’m sure there’s Silverlight guys hanging around in the coffee rooms all the time!
  
• Drag and drop deployment
  Paul also demoed dragging and dropping which looked nice…hope it is cross browser compatible.
• CAML
  So he demos using CAML to data…looks like no clever bits around CamlQuery sigh
• Use of Generics
  
• Better support for Business Connectivity Services Entities(formally called BDC) with a new a BDC Explorer and includes supported Updates now! Be interested to see what Lightning Tools BDC MetaMan goes, suspect that’s why they’ve gone with web version to differentiate themselves
  

Some possible bad things:

• Paul’s demos were on a server machine – so looks like no client side development still
• Still following VSeWSS paradigm where it doesn’t represent the 12 hive…so dumbs it down for developers. This will make it hard for new devs to debug stuff as it’s hiding too much that’s happening under the hood. Be interesting to see how many continue to use WSPBuilder…