I really love it when I see popular applications integrating with SharePoint. Microsoft has called SharePoint, "the operating system for business productivity" and I believe there is so much truth to that. SharePoint's web-based interface and discoverable, security-trimmed navigation makes it a natural fit for today's information-centric enterprises. So it's great when an application decides to "catch the wave" and support its customers who themselves are using or wanting to use SharePoint. I ran across a recent entry in Alex Pearce's blog , which highlights the SharePoint web parts for Moodle, a very popular free content-management system (or learning-management system) that creates a virtual learning environment (VLE). Many of my education clients have implemented Moodle, and some of my corporate clients have explored Moodle as a solution for internal training and learning. Alex's blog post sets up what will be a series of articles about Moodle and SharePoint, and Alex definitely knows what he's talking about. If you're in education or training, check it out!

SPDisposeCheck as an External Tool

I recently highlighted the release of SPDisposeCheck on CodePlex. Well, a resourceful blogger posts the instructions for turning SPDisposeCheck into an external tool for VS 2005 and VS 2008. Since SPDisposeCheck is so critical for developers, might as well make it as easy to work with as possible, eh?

VS 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.3, February 2009 CTP

The developer tools for SharePoint and VS 2008 have been updated and released. VSeWSS1.3 supports development on both WSS and MOSS, with project and item templates for common SharePoint artifacts; build, packaging and deployment for SharePoint solutions; and the SharePoint Solution Generator, which creates a new project from a SharePoint site.

Another Peek is Given: VS2010 and SharePoint

I'm really happy to point developers to an exciting blog entry by S. "Soma" Somaseger. Soma is the senior vice president of the Microsoft developer division, and the blog entry is the next in a series of announcements coming out of Redmond that begin to clarify the scope of change in the next wave of Office, SharePoint, and Visual Studio. "In Visual Studio 2010," Soma writes, "We’re going to expand Sharepoint [sic] support in two key areas. First, Visual Studio 2010 will deliver a broad set of project templates, designers, and deployment infrastructure that will make any .NET developer instantly more productive on the SharePoint platform. Second, we are exposing an extensibility API that will continue to foster the ecosystem of third party developers who create development tools and technologies." VS 2010, widely expected (though not yet announced) to be available late this year, will offer a broad range of project and item templates, along with more comprehensive workflow projects (including site-level workflows! yay!), and all kinds of new designers. The Visual Studio extensibility API will also open the door to innovative new functionality for Visual Studio.