SharePoint 2010

The first difference that I saw, was the installation size. In Beta 2 my configuration was around 3.7GB, in RC it increased to 4.2GB! Still, the Release Candidate makes it worth every MB, because it’s lightning fast! The Add reference window is “just there” and the whole IDE just feels very very responsive: great work VS team!

One of the coolest and probably most frequently used Web Parts in SharePoint 2007 was the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) – a great control that allowed you to display content aggregations to the users. Although it was pretty awesome, it had some serious drawbacks like for example the lack of a paging mechanism – something that almost every single Web Content Management project that I worked on required. Three years later in SharePoint 2010 the CQWP got a facelift and shipped with some seriously cool features like slots and the Content to Content concept. Unfortunately still no sign of paging. So what if you want to create an aggregation of your content and page the contents? Do you have to create a custom and bad performing Web Part? Not really… Introducing Imtech Content Query Web Part v14!

Delivering a great User Experience for a custom application developed on the SharePoint application is really easy using the new SharePoint 2010 UI API. One of the new possibilities is to leverage the Notification Area to communicate the progress of an operation to the users to make using your applications more intuitive and responsive.

SharePoint 2010 ships with a brand new framework for delivering compelling user experiences for custom applications created using the SharePoint platform. One of the pieces of the UI framework is the Status bar which can be used to display persistent messages to the users.