Kurt DelBene just made it official today at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC), that Microsoft is unveiling the public beta of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Project 2010, Visio 2010, Office Web Apps for businesses and Office Mobile 2010 – source MS Press Pass. The Microsoft SharePoint Team blog has also made it official, that the SharePoint Server 2010 Beta and more are available for public consumption.
According to Mary Jo, Microsoft is aiming to launch the final version of all of these Office products, as well as SharePoint 2010 by May/June 2010 - source: ZDNET
Installation Notes & Walkthroughs
The route I plan on taking is developing on my development rig. Here are some links on how to install and some installation notes for SharePoint 2010:
SharePoint 2010 Beta Links
Here are the public links for downloading SharePoint 2010 beta:
The MSDN subscription links were available on beautiful Monday, November 16, 2009 morning:
SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Beta (x64) - (English) Office SharePoint Designer 2010 Beta (x64) - (English) Office Web Applications 2010 Beta (x64) - (English) Office Search Server Express 2010 Beta (x64) - (English) Office Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x64) - (English) Office Visio Premium 2010 Beta (x86) - (English) FAST Search Server SharePoint 2010 Beta (x64) - (English) Office Project Server 2010 Beta (x64) - (English) Office Project Professional 2010 Beta (x64) - (English) If you are a MSDN subscriber, go ahead straight to MSDN or TechNet to collect your SharePoint 2010 downloads!
Historical Perspective
We can all remember back to the year 2006, when very little documentation was available during the beta release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. 3 years later and you can see a momentum shift in how Microsoft works. They are not only releasing tons of documentation but from my perspective are changing the way they build their products. They have listened to feedback from the community and have incorporated many of these requests into Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. I, for one, look forward to working with my clients on upgrade and fresh installations. I don’t doubt as we all get more familiar with the product, that we’ll find quirks and issues in the new beta release. I also don’t doubt that Service Packs and future product releases will fix those shortcomings. But I do know and have trust in the mother ship, also known as Microsoft! Let’s be thankful and provide positive criticism / feedback when its necessary.
For now, I’d like to leave you with a few links:
SharePoint 2010 Resources
SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Models
SharePoint 2010 Product Details
Channel 9 Developer Training Videos Online
SharePoint 2010 Developer Roadmap Accessing External Data SharePoint 2010 Security Services Architecture Enterprise Content Management Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint 2010 Developing Workflows with VS 2010 There are so many videos that these were hand picked and I highly recommend you check out the other videos as well.
For more information on SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010 please check out: