Exciting SharePoint Features coming to Visual Studio 11

If you are a SharePoint Developer or Architect, you probably are well aware of the numerous limitations in developing applications for SharePoint:

1. Functionality such as client-based InfoPath Forms cannot be easily Unit Tested or Tested
2. Web Tests for SharePoint are not very reliable
3. Unit Testing for SharePoint requires separately downloading and installing Pex and Moles
4. Web Part development does not lend itself well to creating and developing Unit Tests
5. Load Testing for SharePoint cannot be done through the Load testing tools available in Visual Studio 2010.  Even community developed tools still expect Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to perform load testing on the environment.

Fortunately, the Visual Studio 11 roadmap has plans to address (at least some of) these issues. 

"In Visual Studio 11 we are expanding our support for teams working with SharePoint with features like performance profiling, unit testing, and IntelliTrace support. In the first Ultimate Feature Pack after Visual Studio 11 we’ll make it easy to test your site for high volume by introducing SharePoint load testing. We will also make it easier to do SharePoint unit testing by providing Behaviors support for SharePoint API’s. This is a great win for teams developing SharePoint solutions."  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2012/03/27/visual-studio-ultimate-roadmap.aspx

Based on the description provided in the roadmap, Pex and Moles will soon be integrated directly into the Unit Testing framework for Visual Studio 11 and SharePoint Load Testing will finally be supported in the latest version of the IDE!!

I am certainly looking forward to the release of this feature pack to make my SharePoint development tasks easier.