Microsoft announced the public beta release of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, Project 2010, Office Web Apps for business customers, and Office Mobile 2010.  You can download, use and develop on the public beta at Microsoft Office 2010. You will also want to use Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

Office 2010 provides a productivity experience across the PC, phone, and browser.  It is full of new innovations that make using Office faster and easier than ever—including Office Backstage View, Ribbon UI across all applications, photo and video editing in PowerPoint, fast new data comparison tools in Excel, and improved mail/calendar management in Outlook.  With the new Click-to-Run technology, home users will also have a dramatically faster download experience. 

In addition, with this beta we are unveiling several new features and products:

• Office Web Apps for business customers, available through SharePoint Server, allows //my and //sharepoint sites to host browser-based Web Apps accessible from virtually anywhere. (Office Web Apps for consumers is still in Technical Preview.)
• Outlook Social Connector, a new feature that brings communications history and social networking feeds into the Outlook experience.
• Office Mobile 2010, which includes mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 and is available on the Windows Mobile marketplace for Windows Mobile 6.5 phones.

Office 2010 Developer Resources

For developers, there is more opportunity than ever to use Office and SharePoint to build business applications that connect business users to the information they need.  Among other things, the Office and SharePoint 2010 wave enables you to:

• Extend the Office UI, the Remote Client API, and OpenXML file formats for business application client development in Office2010. For more information, see Technical Articles on Office 2010.
• Build business applications with Visual Studio 2010 for first-class tooling and Silverlight for mash-able Web parts
• Support SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online applications with REST-based access to the Windows Azure platform

Office 2010 Beta is a broadly extensible platform for building information worker productivity solutions and developing for Office with Visual Studio 2010 makes this easy. The following six key initiatives show you how to get started developing with Office 2010.

• Getting Started Developing with Office 2010
• Extending the Office 2010 Backstage View and Other UI
• Working with Office 2010 Data Through the File Formats and Office APIs
• Integrating External Data and SharePoint 2010 Platform Services in Office 2010 Solutions
• Creating Tracking Applications in Office 2010 and Publishing Them to SharePoint 2010
• Using Office 2010 APIs to Customize Application Behavior and Automate Tasks

For more information, see the Office 2010 Beta Developer Center.

SharePoint 2010 Developer Resources

Together, the 2010 business productivity product line ensures that the whole of our offerings is truly greater than the sum of its parts.  SharePoint 2010 plus Office 2010 provides a rich and robust platform for the enterprise and the Web, and allows Microsoft partners and developers to build innovative new business collaboration solutions. 

Software developers can use the SharePoint 2010 business collaboration platform to build enterprise-class solutions for intranet portals and the web. Use these ten modules to get started with development for SharePoint 2010 using Visual Studio 2010. To see the ten course modules, see Get Started Developing on SharePoint 2010. You’ll find these courses:

Getting Started Home Page

Module 1: Getting Started: Building Web Parts in SharePoint 2010

Module 2: What Developers Need to Know About SharePoint 2010

Module 3: Building Blocks for Web Part Development in SharePoint 2010

Module 4: Accessing SharePoint 2010 Data and Objects with Server-Side APIs

Module 5: Accessing SharePoint 2010 Data and Objects with Client-Side APIs

Module 6: Accessing External Data with Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010

Module 7: Developing Business Processes with SharePoint 2010 Workflows

Module 8: Creating Silverlight User Interfaces for SharePoint 2010 Solutions

Module 9: Sandboxed Solutions for Web Parts in SharePoint 2010

Module 10: Creating Dialog Boxes and Ribbon Controls for SharePoint 2010

The Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Beta) software development kit (SDK) contains conceptual overviews, programming tasks, samples, and references to guide you in developing solutions based on SharePoint 2010 products and technologies. You can download the SharePoint 2010 developer kit at SharePoint 2010 Reference: Software Development Kit.

Also see SharePoint 2010 Developer Content Published.

Feature Demo

To learn more about the features in Office 2010, see this video where Chris Bryant briefs analysts and demonstrates new product features.

 

Bruce D. Kyle
ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation