Useful Development Tools
The Partner Portal application was developed with the Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services. The extensions include many useful features and project templates. To learn more, see Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services.
Two common development activities are writing Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) queries and creating custom list definitions. There are various tools available that simplify these tasks. For information about tools that can help you write CAML queries, see CAML Query Tools. For information about tools that can help you create custom list definitions, see List Definition Authoring Tools.
The Partner Portal application uses the Business Data Catalog (BDC) to access an external system that contains the Contoso product catalog. There are several editors available to help you write the BDC application definition file. For more information, see Business Data Catalog Editors.
If you do not want to programmatically change a SharePoint property bag, you can use one of the property bag editors that are available. For more information, see Property Bag Editors.
This release of the Partner Portal application and Training Management application includes unit tests that use mock objects. The unit tests require a third-party software tool named Typemock Isolator. For more information, see Typemock.
SharePoint Designer allows you to create and deploy interactive solutions on the SharePoint platform, without having to write code. For more information, see SharePoint Designer.