I was reading the latest version of MSDN magazine last night and noticed an interesting article.  In short, the good news is that Microsoft is moving towards making SharePoint development easier – FINALLY!  Granted, this is just a start, but it is a good start.  Here is a synopsis:

Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint Development

Intro:

1. SharePoint development has been a bit of a mystery to many developers, who have felt that developing for the platform was cumbersome and out of their reach.
2. Visual Studio 2010 will offer developers a great entry into SharePoint development with the new SharePoint tools that will ship in the box.
3. The two core developer tools for SharePoint 2010 are SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.

Visual Studio 2010 Enhancements:
A number of areas for SharePoint developers in Visual Studio 2010 are worth mentioning.  There are other enhancements for SharePoint in VS2010, but these are the big ones. 

1. You get SharePoint project templates in the box, so you can start right away on solution development.
2. Tooling has standardized on the Windows SharePoint Package (WSP) packaging standard, so when you import or deploy a solution to SharePoint, Visual Studio treats it as a solution package.
3. Some great deployment and packaging features, such as solution retraction and custom deployment configurations, ship with the SharePoint tools in Visual Studio 2010.
4. The new SharePoint Explorer provides a view into native and custom artifacts (for example, lists and workflows) that exist on your SharePoint server.

SharePoint 2010 Enhancements Supported by Visual Studio 2010:
Also worth mentioning are a few of the SharePoint 2010 enhancements, which can definitely be used in the context of Visual Studio 2010.  For each of the following innovations in SharePoint 2010, Visual Studio 2010 provides some measure of support, whether through project templates or APIs, for professional developers:

1. The new client object model enables you to access SharePoint objects through a referenced DLL as opposed to Web service calls.
2. LINQ for SharePoint brings the power of LINQ to SharePoint
3. Silverlight (especially in combination with the client object model) is supported natively in SharePoint 2010
4. Sandboxed solutions also offer a way to build SharePoint Web Parts and deploy them to a site without needing administrative intervention
5. Finally, external data lists make interacting with line-of-business systems a read/write process, and while seemingly small, this is a huge leap forward given the tools support that enables you to build line-of-business integrations quickly and efficiently.

The article can be found at:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee309510.aspx