Resources for Visual Studio Tools for SharePoint Developers

Nearly all of the tools for SharePoint development included in Visual Studio 2010 are new, so learning about them and finding help and information can be a challenge. To help you in this quest, I’ve compiled a list of links to helpful resources, including product documentation, web sites, forums, and blogs. As new resources become available, I’ll add them to the list. If you know of any other sites you think others would find useful, feel free to add them to the comments and I’ll periodically update the list.

Learning

For learning about the Visual Studio 2010 tools for SharePoint Development, check out the new Help topics. The portal page for these is: SharePoint Development in Visual Studio.
Visual Studio provides tools for developing SharePoint sites. To find out more about how SharePoint itself works, start at the portal page: SharePoint 2010. For those who don’t know, there are two versions of SharePoint: SharePoint Foundation 2010 (formerly known as Windows SharePoint Services, or WSS) and SharePoint Server 2010 (formerly known as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, or MOSS).
To learn about extending the Visual Studio SharePoint tools, including how to create your own SharePoint project and project item templates, see Extending the SharePoint Tools in Visual Studio.
For details about the Visual Studio SharePoint project system API, see Reference (SharePoint Tools Extensibility).
Channel 9 features videos relating to SharePoint and SharePoint tools, including a great comprehensive (and free!) SharePoint 2010 Developer Training Course.
Because SharePoint sites are built on ASP.NET and IIS, having a deeper understanding of those technologies is useful.

Blogs

In addition to this blog (Visual Studio SharePoint Development Blog), there is a blog for SharePoint called the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog that focuses on SharePoint development-related questions and issues.
Although though the list is dated, many of the blogs in SharePoint Joel’s Top 100 SharePoint Blogs of Spring 2008 are still active and involved in SharePoint 2010 development.

Forums and Newsgroups

The official forum for Visual Studio SharePoint is located at SharePoint Development with Visual Studio,
The official forum for SharePoint 2010 is located at SharePoint 2010 Forum.
The SharePoint Usenet groups are located at Microsoft.Public.SharePoint.

Other Resources

The SharePoint 2010 Developer Resource Centers page has a centralized list of resources for common tasks such as upgrading, best practices, and security.
For code samples relating to SharePoint and SharePoint tools, see the MSDN Code Gallery.
Information about upgrading and migrating to SharePoint 2010 can be found at: Upgrade Resource Center | SharePoint 2010.
For a large list of resources relating to earlier versions of SharePoint, see Heather Solomon’s SharePoint Resources page.
To query the Microsoft Knowledge Base about SharePoint and Visual Studio issues, see MSDN Troubleshooting and Support.