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Project Templates

Excerpt by Doug Ware | November 20, 2013

The first thing you do when building a new solution in Visual Studio 2010 is to select a project template. The template you select determines the tools that are available and how Visual Studio behaves when you build the project. Visual Studio comes with project templates for a variety of Windows and Web application types. Among these are a number of templates for building SharePoint applications. Several of the project templates concern development of specific types of features. Each of these is a starting point that allows you to add any type of feature, but that starts with an element manifest that corresponds with the project template's name. The feature oriented project templates are:

  •  List Definition
  •  Content Type
  •  Module
  •  Event Receiver

Workflows are an important component of most SharePoint environments. There are five workflow specific project templates for SharePoint, two of these support workflow development for SharePoint 2007. The SharePoint workflow templates are:

  •  Sequential Workflow
  •  State Machine Workflow
  • Import Reusable Workflow
  •  SharePoint 2007 Sequential Workflow
  •  SharePoint 2007 State Machine Workflow

The SharePoint 2007 workflow templates are the only direct support Visual Studio offers developers writing code for SharePoint 2007. All of the other project templates support only SharePoint 2010. The remaining SharePoint project templates are:

  • Empty SharePoint Project: An empty project with SharePoint tools.
  • Visual Web Part: A user control and a Web Part wrapper with a feature to add the Web Part to the deployment target.
  • Business Data Connectivity Model: A project with tools for building Business Connectivity Services applications.
  • Site Definition: A project pre-populated with files for a custom site definition.
  • Import SharePoint Solution Package: A project with imported contents from a WSP usually generated via the Save Site as Template functionality of a SharePoint site.

Most large solutions start with the Empty SharePoint Project template.

doug (frame 367 of smile clip)This post is an excerpt from the online courseware for our Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Developers course written by expert Doug Ware.

Doug Ware

Doug Ware is a SharePoint expert and an instructor for many of our SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 courses. A Microsoft MVP several times over, Doug is the leader of the Atlanta .NET User Group, one of the largest user groups in the Southeast U.S., and is a frequent speaker at code camps and other events. In addition to teaching and writing about SharePoint, Doug stays active as a consultant and has helped numerous organizations implement and customize SharePoint.

SharePoint

This course excerpt was originally posted November 20, 2013 from the online courseware SharePoint 2010: Developer by Doug Ware