Microsoft SharePoint Designer is now Free !

SharePoint Designer Team at Microsoft has announced at its blog here that Anyone can use SharePoint Designer as a free tool. This is really a step in right direction and will help SharePoint community to build better user experiences. 

You can download the SharePoint Designer from here

Ten Themes for SharePoint in VSeWSS Projects

Ten new SharePoint themes have been released by Microsoft to help SharePoint designers to make new sites more efficientlty. You will find them as individual  Visual Studio 2008 projects which when deployed to SharePoint offer fresh new designed themes you can use in your projects. 

Themes can be downloaded from here

Following is a preview image of these themes (from Sharepoint.microsoft.com)

Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.3 – Mar 2009 CTP

A goow news for SharePoint community Microsoft has releasesd the Mar 2009 CTP of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 v1.3. This CTP contains excellent set of functionalities and saves your precious time. You can download the extensions from here

Following is the overview as released by Microsoft

This is the SharePoint developer tools for Visual Studio 2008. These tools are suitable for use with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It includes project and item templates for common SharePoint artifacts, it includes build, packaging and deployment for SharePoint solutions and it includes the SharePoint Solution Generator which creates a new Visual Studio 2008 project from a SharePoint site.

The tools provide item templates for List Definition, List Definition from Content Type, Content Type, Field Control, Web Part, Module, Root File, Template, Event Receiver, and List Instance. It provides project templates for Team Site Definition, Blank Site Definition, List Definition, Web Part and Empty. It works with Visual Basic .NET and C# languages and a comprehensive user guide is included. It does not include the SharePoint Workflow templates as they are built in with Visual Studio 2008.

New features in version 1.3 include:

• Can be installed on x64 Server OS machines running SharePoint x64. Previously only x86 Server OS could be used
• Separate build commands for package, deploy and retract are added as Visual Studio menu items
• WSP View improvements for consistency of deleting feature elements, merging features and adding event receivers to features
• Command line build, package and retract commands are included enabling continuous integration and build servers. Previously command line build of SharePoint projects was very difficult
• Refactoring support for renaming of Web Parts. Previously renaming a web part required changes in several files in the project
• Solution Generator can now generate solutions from publishing sites. Previously only regular sites could be generated
• Allowing partial trust BIN deployments of web parts
• New project item template for SharePoint RootFiles items
• Deployment will now optionally remove conflicting existing features on the development server prior to redeployment. Previously any feature name conflicts would result in an error
• Ancillary assemblies such as for business logic can now be added to the SharePoint Solution WSP
• Hidden features related to Site Definition projects are now shown in WSP View. They are no longer hidden
• For advanced users a fast deploy is included to update only the compiled assembly on the SharePoint development installation
• Deployment step logging is included
• The List Definition from Content Type template now allows for the creation of a List Definition Event Receiver
• The User Guide is now installed with the extensions instead of being a separate download

Verify your code with SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool

Today, a new tool  SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool  has been released at MSDN for checking your code against incorrect processing of IDisposable objects like. SPSite and SPWeb. This tool checks your assembly and identify potential problems of not disposing these objects. 

You can download SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool from here

and here is the great article from Paul Andrew (Microsoft Technical Product Manager for the SharePoint Developer Platform) about best practices and how to use this tool.