Office and SharePoint 2010 Available on MSDN
Microsoft released the final versions of its Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 wave of products to MSDN and TechNet subscribers on Thursday. Available subscriber downloads include Office Professional Plus, Office Web Apps, SharePoint Server, Visio and Project 2010.
Kudos to the engineering and marketing teams at Microsoft, after all that work, they even nailed the timing of the rollouts. MSDN subscribers get the final bits first and the worldwide launch event is slated for May 12, almost a month after the RTMs in mid-April.
Volume license customers with Software Assurance will have access to Office 2010 on April 27, according to a blog posting earlier this month by Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president, Microsoft Office. Partners will start to sell English versions of the software on May 1st and it will be available at retail in the United States in June.
The 64-bit version of Office 2010 could cause a lot of headaches for existing add-ins, so developers may want to stick with 32-bit. Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, released earlier this month, offer numerous enhancements aimed at easing the task of Office customizations. Microsoft's Navneet Gupta makes a pitch today in the Office dev blog for upgrading to .NET 4 for Office solutions, highlighting the new .NET 4 Client Profile and advances in the VSTO runtime. Gupta provides numerous links to helpful articles and resources.
The Office engineering team worked with more than 5,000 organizations and partners, according to Numoto. He also said that 7.5 million people had downloaded the betas since they were made publicly available in November.
If you are tackling SharePoint 2010, it is now 64-bit only and features SharePoint Foundation (formerly called WSS), SharePoint Server (MOSS) and the free SharePoint designer. The public download of the final version of SharePoint Foundation 2010 was also made available on Thursday.
Visual Studio 2010 introduces lots of new tooling for SharePoint development including templates for Visual Web Parts. You can also do client-side development for the first time on Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1 before testing and deploying a Web part to the server. SharePoint Server 2010 requires 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 or R2, and SQL Server 2008 or 2005. Developers may want to get a head start on figuring out how to migrate their 32-bit SharePoint apps to 64-bit environments.
MSDN offers some information on setting up a development environment for SharePoint 2010. As the documentation notes, SharePoint Foundation only runs on 64-bit versions of Windows server, which is another reason that Microsoft strongly recommends that developers use Visual Studio 2010 for development.
SharePoint projects in Visual Studio 2010 must target .NET 3.5 -- SharePoint 2010 does not support .NET 4. Checkout Microsoft's SharePoint Samples for the VS2010 RTM, which are available in C# and Visual Basic.
The cover story of Visual Studio Magazine in June will highlight developers' experiences with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Have you worked with the technical previews? Express your thoughts on the new platforms and your experiences so far, good and bad. We are also looking for projects to profile. Drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com.
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 04/23/2010 at 3:39 PM