Welcome to the home of the Community Kit for SharePoint: Development Tools Edition.
This project extends the Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint project system with advanced templates and tools. Using these extensions you will be able to find relevant information from your SharePoint environments without leaving Visual Studio. You will have greater productivity while developing SharePoint components and you will have greater deployment capabilities on your local SharePoint installation.
What's new in this release 
The current 1.1 release includes the following features:
- Improvements to Quick Deploy - Performance improvements phase one and some minor defect fixes in GACUtil calls.
- Existing VS2010 SPI Providers - Projects with existing CKSDev SPIs now supported.
- SharePoint 2010 Console project template - Project template for a SharePoint 2010 console application.
- SharePoint 2013 Console project template - Project template for a SharePoint 2013 console application.
Download CKSDev
This CodePlex site serves as the place to get project news and source code. The extensions themselves are distributed through the
Visual Studio Gallery. You have direct access to the Visual Studio Gallery from within the Extension Manager. For installation instructions see the
Installation Guide. Never miss an update again, with direct update notification from the Visual Studio Gallery when we publish a new version.
Which version should I download?
If you are using Visual Studio 2012 then please use the following:
Download and install the
CKS - Dev for Visual Studio 2012 versionIf you are using Visual Studio 2010 then please use either of the following:
If you are using
SharePoint Foundation 2010 then download and install the
SharePoint Foundation 2010 versionIf you are using
SharePoint Server 2010 then download and install the
SharePoint Server 2010 version
Features
This project provides extensions to four core areas;
Environment,
Exploration,
Content and
Deployment. Enhancements to the Visual Studio environment include the new SharePoint References tab available on the Add Reference dialog, allowing you to easily reference any SharePoint assembly without searching the file system or GAC for it. Exploration extends the new SharePoint Explorer with advanced information about SharePoint sites such as the installed Web Parts and Master Pages or the Feature dependencies and elements. Also included in the Explorer are a variety of import functions to bring existing SharePoint items into your active solution. The Content area includes advanced templates such as Linq to SharePoint, Custom Action or Delegate Control. Project templates include the SharePoint Full Trust Proxy and the SharePoint Console Application. Our enhanced Deployment functions give you the ability to utilise quick deployment and almost a dozen other productivity enhancing deployment steps, including automated deployment (per file on change deployment) Find the complete overview of all the CKS Development Tools Edition features on the
Documentation tab.
With the release of Microsoft's excellent
Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools the CKSDev team have retired the Sandboxed Visual web part item template. for more information read
Wouter's blog
Approach
Visual Studio 2010 contains a new SharePoint development project model that allows you to easily package SharePoint components without the need for external tools such as MakeCab. Built around the core concept of extensibility the SharePoint project model allows you to extend every aspect of the out of the box experience. The CKS Development Tools Edition fully embraces the extensibility model to enable you in ways not available out of the box, with tools and templates that enhance the development experience to make you a more productive SharePoint developer. Note that this project extends that which is available out of the box and does not replace any of the built-in functionality. It is not yet another SharePoint Development Paradigm but a set of productivity tools to enable developers. There are no components that need to be installed into production environments.
Contribute
If you have a great idea for a deployment tool, template or any other thing that you believe increases developer productivity, contribute! Contact the
Project team or add your idea to the
issue tracker. Use the
#CKSDev tag to follow and connect with the team.
See the
Contributor Hall of Fame for details about community contributions already included in CKSDev.
CKSDev presentations
The event presentations and code samples used during CKSDev presentation events are found on the
CKSDev at Events page.
There are also a series of introductory screen casts demonstrate the power of CKS:Dev found on the
CKSDev Screen casts page.
Project history
CKS:DEV has been formed as a merger of the SharePoint Dev Tools, SPVSX and Imtech Visual Studio Extensions projects.
About the Community Kit for SharePoint
The
Community Kit for SharePoint is a set of editions, components, tools and recommended documentation for SharePoint development. You are currently viewing the edition project site for the Development Tools Edition. To learn about the other editions and components you can go to
http://www.communitykitforsharepoint.org/default.aspx.
For the latest version of the CKS charter document, click
here.
IMPORTANT: Please note that the Community Kit for SharePoint is not officially maintained or supported by Microsoft. Support for this edition is provided only via the discussion forum associated with this edition.