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Microsoft Readies Second CTP of VS Extensions for SharePoint

Microsoft will release the second community technology preview (CTP) of its Visual Studio (VS) Extensions for SharePoint in the coming weeks, a company official said on Friday.

The updated CTP will consist primarily of bug fixes and some minor feature adjustments, said Paul Andrew, a senior technical product manager on Microsoft's SharePoint developer team.

"It's expected very, very soon. I'd say probably the next couple of weeks we should have that out," Andrew said in an interview.

VS 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS) version 1.3 are templates for creating, debugging, packaging and deploying SharePoint applications. The release includes templates for Web Parts, Data Lists, Content Types, Event Receivers and Modules, among others.

Andrew emphasized that the first CTP was feature- and code-complete. "Mostly what we have been doing since that last CTP is more of that testing and overhaul to make sure it has a good policy that people can extend it in ways that they expect and do the things that they need to do," he said.

There will be one noteworthy change, according to Andrew. In the first CTP, Microsoft added support for deploying to the bin directory. "We've taken that a little bit further to make sure it does everything you need to have a solution able to be F5-ed and run in debug mode in the bin directory out of the box with the tools," he said.

Andrew said he is confident the final release will be ready to ship within four months. "It's a more stable build and it's a more complete build than the previous CTP," he said. "I don't expect people to find any more bugs but if we do, we'll work through those. We are sort of running it as a quality-based release. We've spent all of the time with the devs in testing and debugging in making it more solid, making it more expectable what happens out of the box."

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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