Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools

Microsoft recently posted about the new VS 2010 SharePoint Power Tools project. Right now the contents are pretty slim, but the two things that are in there are freaking awesome. Both relate to the new Sandbox Solutions.

The two things the VS 2010 SharePoint Power Tools give you are the ability to include visual Web Parts in your sandbox solutions (which you can’t do without these tools) and also some compile time checking when building your sandbox solutions. This second one is the coolest one to me.

When you are building sandbox solutions, you are compiling against the fully trusted & full SharePoint API. However when you are running on the server, your code is running against the subset of the full API using the special SharePoint sandboxed proxy API. This blocks you from doing calls to SPSecurity and the like. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal when writing new components, it can be when you are copying code in or grabbing something from CodePlex. When you build everything looks good, but at runtime you hit issues.

Before these tools in order to verify you aren’t doing anything illegal and to get compile time issues, you had to manually remove the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll reference from your project and point to the subset API assembly, compile, fix and then set the reference back. The power tools now do this for you! Nice work!

PS – both of these were in the CKS:DEV project, but I think they will be more widely used in a Power Tool set.

» Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,sharepoint 2010,visual studio 2010,sandbox,web part

posted on Tuesday, June 22, 2010 6:37 AM

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# re: Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools 11/28/2010 12:01 PM san

Hi Andrew,

Regarding your video on Sandbox in channel9 channel9.msdn.com/.../SandboxedSolutionAdminist...

I do not see any video link here on Administering Sandboxed Solutions , is this video available in any other site?

Thanks

# re: Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools 1/27/2011 3:06 AM Jos van Putte

Hello Andrew,

I need to develop a visual webpart in a webapplication scope and should be able to do this with the powertools.
I installed them but did not get new templates. I wonder if the tools work on the x64 machine we are using ?

Greets

# re: Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools 3/28/2011 7:23 AM GiUmaTo

@Jos van Putte:
Not sure if it's the same issue as yours. I'm running Win7 64bit. I've moved my VS 2010 default folders to another location, different from the standard "user\documents\visual studio 2010" tree.
When I installed those power tools, I could not see any new element after Add item command.
I checked and there was a "...\SharePoint\SharePoint14\1033\SharePoint14Linq2SharePoint.zip" both inside "\Templates\ItemTemplates\C#\" and "\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual Basic\" subtrees.
I moved both to my actual "Visual C#" (not just C#) and "Visual Basic" item templates subtrees, and now in Add item windows I can see some new items.
For sure there's a new "Visual Web Part (Sandboxed)", but I think also "Linq to sharepoint Data Model" is new.

HTH

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