While copying my rapidly lengthening scribbled to do list into a SharePoint Tasks list, my unconscious habit of middle-clicking items to come back to was being constantly foiled. Instead of opening a new tab the modal box kept popping up in the middle of my screen (new to 2010 I hear).
The drop-down menu options did exactly the same, leaving no alternative but to right-click the item, copy the link, manually open a new tab, paste it in, and switch back; much too much like hard work. So I decided to add an option to open the item in a new window… in retrospect probably harder work than just putting up with it.
As a result, this is a brief run-through of how to add options to the context menu of list items in SharePoint, using a CustomAction in Visual Studio. For using JavaScript to the same ends, see Part 2: Using JavaScript (coming soon).
