Visual Studio 2010 Package designers for SharePoint

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tooling supports packaging of WSP files with visual designers, tool-windows and MSBuild. Here we start by introducing the designers.

The feature and package designers expose deployment concepts which are familiar to SharePoint developers. These include features, packages and SharePoint items as well as their attributes and contents. Some of them include feature scope, feature dependencies, packaged assemblies, safe-controls, class resources, and more. Additionally, the designers abstract away the more difficult concepts and provide pre-deployment validation rules to avoid common issues when deploying your solutions.  The designers allow advanced users partial or full control of the feature and solution manifest files to merge or add data and view the final product.  Whatever your skill level you’ll find the new designers an exciting addition to your SharePoint development arsenal.

The best way to get started with packaging is to create a SharePoint project. SharePoint projects come standard with a Features and Package folder in your project. There are 0..n features in a SharePoint project and always 1 package. Here is a sample List Definition project as viewed in the solution explorer.