CKS Visual Studio Extension

I have discovered that CKS visual studio extension in an awesome tool for all SharePoint developers. It comes in two flavors:

• SharePoint 2010 (Server)
• SharePoint 2010 (Foundation)

 After installation, we open Visual Studio 2010 and Create a SharePoint project (SharePointProject1) we would be to get a new project template "SharePoint Console Application". Its such amazing template because lot of developers prefer SharePoint console application to test simpler modules such as getting list instance, looping SharePoint groups and even testing for regular expressions, strings comparison etc that does not requires IIS, Recycle Application pool.
 

 When we right click >> Add >> New Item and we will presented lot of new templates:

Must have tools for Developer

There are lot of free tools that are must have for SharePoint developer.

MSDN "Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) is the XML-based language that is used to build and customize Web sites based on SharePoint
CAML can be used to do the following:

• Provide schema definition to the Web site provisioning system about how the site looks and acts.
• Define views and forms for data and page rendering or execution.
• Act as a rendering language that performs functions in the DLL like pulling a value from a particular field.
• Provide batch functionality for posting multiple commands to the server using protocol. "

There are lot of free tools that are must have for SharePoint developer. One of most used SharePoint tool is U2U CAML builder which can be found here. Its still valid for SharePoint 2010. However, LINQ to SharePoint has become more popular. In fact LINQ internally translates into CAML in earlier post.