Note: This sale has now ended.

For our friends in the northern hemisphere it’s that time of the year – it’s warming up and there’s a holiday approaching. We thought it would be a great time to offer a special for the summer so that you have a great toolbox at your disposal for when you’re coding away on the beach.

Here’s the deal:

For the price of our WPF or Silverlight suites you can get a full Mindscape Mega Pack upgrade at no extra charge! And to save you money in the long run we’ll also add an additional six months of updates! Now that will afford you a few extra Mojitos!

So that’s every Mindscape product — WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, LightSpeed, SimpleDB, you name it — and 18 whole months of nightly builds, upgrades and entirely new products! All at a fraction of the price of other competing suites.

Throw on your skate shoes and roll over to the Summer Sale Page!

We’ve gone all enterprisy with our latest release – Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010. In fact, we’re so enterprisy that this is our slowest release to date – we actually finished developing this product several months ago and gave it out to a bunch of users to work with. Nothing like being slow to feel enterprise ready!

Jokes aside, we’re pleased to get this release out and into the hands of our users. Like all our products, there’s a free version that you can grab and start playing with right away.

So what does Visual Tools for SharePoint 2010 actually do?

It helps developers who want to work with LINQ-to-SharePoint, a new feature in SharePoint 2010. Unfortunately, if you’re wanting to do that then you need to work with some awkward command line tools to build up a model. Thankfully, visual modelling is something we have a bunch of experience with so we thought we could give developers a better way to work with LINQ-to-SharePoint models. It will save developers a heap of time when working with LINQ-to-SharePoint by generating LINQ classes and data contexts for SharePoint lists. If you don’t work with SharePoint 2010, or have any interest in LINQ-to-SharePoint then this product isn’t for you sorry!

There’s also the ability to nicely synchronize your model from your SharePoint store if you’re making rapid changes to your SharePoint list structure:

It’s also our first product that has any connection to the insanely successful SharePoint product. We’re looking forward to hearing what sorts of interaction you would like to have with SharePoint from within Visual Studio so that we can roll out new features into this product (hence we didn’t limit the name to only talking about LINQ-to-SharePoint).

Pricing and trial

We’re retailing Visual Tools for SharePoint at $349 USD which includes 12 months of updates like all Mindscape purchases. Click here to visit the store. Trial editions can be downloaded from here.

We’d love to get your feedback and, as mentioned, if there’s anything else you’d like us to do with SharePoint let us know either in the comments or in our forums.

Get Visual Tools for Sharepoint FREE

The first 50 people to create accounts with Mindscape (click here to register) and then email their username and email address to jd@mindscape.co.nz will get a free license to Visual Tools for SharePoint. I’ll update this post when the give aways are complete, but be quick! UPDATE: All the free copies have been taken sorry!

What would you say…. you do?

Visual Tools for SharePoint is our first SharePoint related product and one of the exciting new features in SharePoint 2010 is “LINQ to SharePoint”. As many of you will know, our LightSpeed product has a fantastic LINQ provider and design surface for databases, so we are interested in all things LINQ. Microsoft have not made a visual design surface in Visual Studio for modeling things in SharePoint that you wish to query – you need to use an arcane command line tool. We love our Visual Studio integration and decided we could do better!

Here’s a screenshot (click to see it larger):

So you can connect to SharePoint from the VS 2010 Server Explorer, drag and drop your lists and have us create LINQ to SharePoint contexts and classes for you. No more mucking around with command lines and XML configuration files! This helps developers save time, makes generating your objects to query much easier and saves you having to leave Visual Studio 2010. Plus you can quickly update your models from the SharePoint site so as to see what’s new or changed.

What do you think?

With any new product we need end user feedback – that’s why we’re giving away copies to the first 50 users. You’ll get immediate access to the beta and a free copy of the toolkit when the retail version ships. (You’ll need Visual Studio 2010 Professional or above, and SharePoint 2010, to use the product.)

We want to evolve all of our products based on the feedback we receive and make all the changes available to users through our much loved nightly build process. Please let us know what you think in the comments on this post or in our forums :-)

So what are you waiting for? Sign up and email us your username and email address now!