Paul Stubbs

When building custom SharePoint 2010 solutions, it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of Silverlight 4 on the front end. We’ll walk you through the process of building a Silverlight Web Part with Visual Studio and Expression Blend.

SharePoint 2010 introduces a number of new ways to access business data and present it to the user. We’ll show you several options that range from no-code solutions to fully integrated Office add-ins.

The challenge in SharePoint development has always been the balance between creating and deploying solutions that you can trust not to damage or impair a SharePoint farm. A new feature in SharePoint 2010, called Sandboxed Solutions, enables farm administrators to feel comfortable that the SharePoint farm is safe, gives site collection administrators the authority to manage applications in their site collection, and provides developers with the flexibility to create solutions they know will be deployed in a safe and rapid manner.

Find out how to integrate SharePoint and Silverlight by creating a Silverlight media player and deploying it as a SharePoint Web Part.

VSTO brings you the full feature set of Visual Studio including LINQ, WPF, WCF, and the .NET Framework 3.5.

See how to use Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System to build powerful custom applications against the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System is more powerful than ever, allowing you to create add-ins for Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio, and InfoPath.

If you're looking to increase the usefulness of your applications by making them customizable, you'll want to read about these three technologies available from Microsoft.