SharePoint 2010 Branding tools

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About to head off to a client to do about a week’s branding work.  I was loading my SharePoint laptop with all the tools that I think I’ll need.  I thought I would publish the list as well.

 

Designer tools

  • SharePoint Designer 2010
  • Browser: IE 7, 8 or IE9
    • With IE Developer toolbar (in IE8 and IE9 this is built in)
    • Later versions of IE has compatibility modes and can render SharePoint in IE6/7/8 modes.  Strictly speaking this is no substitute for using the corresponding version of IE that your client is using – but you should aim to have a clean HTML that will work anyway.
  • Browser: FireFox (latest stable)
    • With FireBug – you need a stable version of FireBug, so I don’t recommend using the latest alpha/beta FireFox.
    • (Optional) YSlow
  • Browser: Google Chrome
    • Google developer tools are built in
  • Paint tool:
    • (Optional) Adobe Photoshop
    • Paint.NET
  • CSS tool:
    • (Optional) Expression Studio
  • (Optional) Office 2010 Client Applications
    • Is necessary to check various components and menus that only appear when you have the corresponding ActiveX.  In general, if you have SharePoint Designer 2010 installed you should have most components already.

 

Packaging tools

  • Personal SharePoint 2010 VM
  • Visual Studio .NET 2010
    • CKS Dev
    • SharePoint Powertools for Visual Studio .NET
  • Reflector
  • ULS Viewer
  • Fiddler 2