Before you can start developing SharePoint solutions you will need an environment to do it in. Unfortunately for some reason you cannot develop Visual Studio SharePoint solutions remotely: you have to do the development on the actual SharePoint server. This sucks because you cannot develop on a regular XP PC, you have to be on the Windows Server where SharePoint is installed. It seems however that the folks at Bamboo Team has found a way to install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 on Vista x64/x86, impressive! (I have not tested tried this yet)>
If you do not have Vista or do not want to install WSS on your Vista machine, the next best thing is to set up a Virtual PC running Windows Server 2003. I have listed some guides I found on setting up a SharePoint development environment at the end of this post.
Just one note from personal experience on using up Virtual PCs, especially for testing and developing SharePoint solutions. As recommended by one of the listed sites, if at all possible try and set-up your VPC on an external disk. Running VPC on your local disk is one way of shortening your hard disk life dramatically. After two weeks of 8 hour-a-day development on a VPC on my local hard drive it crashed. Yes, you should get concerned when your hard drive access light stays on more than 80% of the time! I have since set up my VPC on an external USB drive, and both my local drive and external drive shows regular-like disk access activity, whoohoo!
A few links and information on setting up your SharePoint development environment:
- Overview: Preparing the Development Environment
- Overview with links & some interesting tools: How to build a SharePoint Development Machine
- Development PC Requirements (including running a VPC on an external drive info): How to develop a SharePoint development machine
- Interesting link on how to set-up VSSeWSS on a non Windows Server PC: How to install the SharePoint 2007 VS 2005 Extensions on a Workstation