I’ve written a number of posts in the last couple of weeks about the new SharePoint features in the Visual Studio 11 developer preview.  These posts include publishing to SharePoint Online, Visual Web Parts, Silverlight Web Part, and the Content Type Editor.  I’ll wrap up this series with a look at the new list editor.  The list editor looks fairly similar to the content type editor actually.  You start by choosing the List SharePoint Project Item from the New Item menu.

Selecting the List SPI will take you to the next screen where you have the choice of creating a new list which is based off of an existing list (i.e. tasks or document library) or to create a new instance of an existing list type.

Once it is complete, you will see the list editor where you can edit site columns and content types.  The site column editor works very similar to the one used for new content types.

The only difference in this interface is that you can actually create new list columns here.  If you click the Content Types button at the bottom, you will see a window allowing you to select content types from those available on the server as well as in your current project.

After you have set your content type, the site columns of the content type will automatically be added to the site column list.  From here, you can click on the Views tab to edit the existing views (or add a new one).  You’ll notice that all views are visible (including ones you normally wouldn’t touch).  Be careful with what you do here.  You can customize the columns in each view.  Unfortunately, the user interface doesn’t give you any control over how things look, row groupings, or sort order though.

Finally, the Common Properties tab lets you set the title, URL, description, whether the list is hidden or not and on the Quick Launch bar.

Once you have finished your list, you can deploy it to a local SharePoint server or publish it to SharePoint Online.  When you visit the site, an instance of the list will be there ready to go.

That’s just a quick look at what you can do with Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.  If you haven’t checked it out yet be sure and visit the developer center on MSDN.