Looking for advice on developing with Sitefinity

Hi -

 We are evaluating sitefinity as a replacment for Sitecore (another .NET CMS).

 Can someone help me understand how it is best to develop with Sitefinity and Visual Studio?

 I would like to be able to create widgets, themes and all other elements that are necessary for a site.

  With Sitecore you opened up the folder containing the website and started working from their.
 
It appears with Thunder I can create a Visual Studio project for themes.     Do I need a separate Visual Studio project for the code assets (widgets, controls, etc)?

Is it a good idea to  open the folder containing the Sitefinity site in Visual Studio as a web site
and start working from their?

  To me it makes sense to have one Visual Studio project where all your assets could be maintained.     By assets I mean themes, widgets, controls, etc.  

  I can't seem to find any good documentation on this discussion.

 Thanks

RDot, you can use Visual Studio to manage all of the above. I manage my themes and my widgets through visual studio. It's not more than files on the file system. You will eventually have to register them but that is pretty straight forward.

Visual Studio Add-on Thunder is likely to be helpful as well. I would suggest for you to have a look at the videos as they explain how to develop Themes and Widgets. That should clarify most of it.

All videos here
www.sitefinity.com/.../videos

These might be of interest
www.sitefinity.com/.../building-a-sitefinity-template

www.sitefinity.com/.../creating-custom-modules-with-sitefinity-thunder

Hope this helps.