STSDev 2008, MicroLink LLC’s codeplex project, is now a publicly available CodePlex project. STSDev 2008 is a more production ready version of the original STSDev project created by Ted Pattison and his team. We have taken their code, corrected several build target and application errors as well as improved the ability of users to develop other custom solutions.
STSDev 2008 is a Visual Studio 2008 Windows Application project now available at:
http://www.codeplex.com/stsdev2008
What is STSDev 2008
STSDev 2008 is an external tool for creating SharePoint solutions. This tool provides unique build targets that allow you to build, deploy, and even retract your solution to your local SharePoint instance. This solution is helpful because it removes the need for you to maintain a manifest.xml and cab .ddf file, just by following the standard SharePoint 12 folder, hive, structure your files will be deployed to the appropriate locations.
STSDev 2008 also provides some default project types to make SharePoint development easier and faster. Some of these include Web Part, Web Service, and Site Application Page projects.
STSDev 2008 Language Support
STSDev 2008 currently only supports Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 C# language projects.