Since the best tool for creating a list is SharePoint itself, why not take advantage of it when deploying a new list to your SharePoint solution? Visual Studio 2010 lets you do that.

Make Visual Studio do the hard work to simplify the creation of external lists that can be used to connect outside data to your SharePoint projects.

Microsoft Lists, with a capital L, is an evolution of the lower-case lists that have formed the major data structure for SharePoint for nearly two decades.