Getting started with SharePoint 2010

Hi All, 

Last week I bought a new PC only for SharePoint 2010 development. It has a pretty high-end configuration specifications: Intel i7-920 processor, Windows 7 home premium (64 bit),  10 GB DDR 3 RAM, 1 TB HDD, Nvidia GeForce GT230 Graphics Card (1.5GB Dedicated RAM). 

The PC has incredible performance. I also downloaded VMware player and got a SharePoint VM from one of my colleagues. Microsoft has given a lot of free sources for developer community and it could be find here. It has lot of hands-on labs, solutions, lot of videos, slide-shows etc. 

Today, I watched Ted Pattison's SharePoint 2010 Development Primer and created a new SharePoint 2010 solution. Its just a simple console application. There are few things to be noted here: 

1. SharePoint 2010 is 64 bit. Therefore developers has to take note of that.
2. SharePoint 2010 is based on .NET framework 3.5. That's why if use .NET FX 4.0 you are bound to get an error. 

Ted Pattison created a console application where he a SPSite and SPWeb for a SharePoint 2010 site and displays all the lists in the web. But he got an error "File not found." So, he went to properties, navigated to "Build" tab and in the "Platform target" he switched to "Any CPU". I did exact steps. For him it worked perfectly well but I got an error.  

"The type or namespace name 'SharePoint' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft' (are you missing an assembly reference?)"

I don't know what was wrong. I again went to solution properties,  navigated to "Application" tab and found that "Target framework" was pointing to ".NET Framework 4 client profile". Obviously, SharePoint 2010 does not support .Net FX 4.0. I switched to .NET framework 3.5. 

Voila!

It worked beautifully!  

My SharePoint 2010 journey has just started! 

Cheers, 

--aaroh