To view this slideshow in its entirety, please visit eWeek:  Microsoft SharePoint 2010: 20 Reasons Developers Are Excited

Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 may be one of the industry's most under-rated products, largely because it means so many different things to different people so no one group or demographic claims it over another. However, Microsoft has been adding more and more features to enable developers to better leverage SharePoint 2010. And as such, developers have responded, prompting SharePoint's popularity to rise among developers, according to Microsoft. SharePoint Server is one of the fastest-growing products in Microsoft's history, with over $1.3 billion in revenue, representing more than a 20 percent growth over the past year. Microsoft attained a significant share of the collaborative content workspace market in 2008 and had the highest growth rate among top vendors with its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, according to IDC. Here are 20 reasons why Microsoft SharePoint 2010 appeals to developers.

Some highlights of the article are as follows:

• With Microsoft SharePoint 2010, developers can compile, debug and test in one of the most widely used development tools out there—Visual Studio.
• Developers can take advantage of the power of SharePoint in other applications using industry standards such as Web Services and Representational State Transfer (REST).
• In addition, developers can build fully branded and highly customized public-facing Internet sites with SharePoint's Web Content Management engine.
• With SharePoint 2010, developers can build insightful business intelligence dashboards using Performance Point Services in SharePoint.
• Microsoft enables developers to use the power of Silverlight to deliver rich user interfaces with the power of SharePoint behind them.