Using VS 2012 and trying to connect to my SharePoint 2013 farm for web and apps development.

I installed the Office Tools for Visual Studio 2012, but when trying to start a new SharePoint 2013 project, I get an error window saying that I have to have SharePoint 2013 Foundation or Server installed in order to create a SharePoint 2013 Project. I get the same error when trying to establish a new SharePoint connection (Tools > Add SharePoint Connection). 

According to the VS 2012 documentation, one does not have to have SharePoint 2013 installed on the same system as Visual Studio anymore, as was the case with SharePoint 2010 / VS 2010. 

What's missing? This page looked promising, but I followed all the instructions here and didn't get further at all: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/timquin/archive/2013/01/22/setting-up-visual-studio-2012-for-sharepoint-2013-development-offline.aspx. 

One note: I am running Office 2010 and Office 2013 locally on the same machine, using Windows 7 OS. Is it possible that Visual Studio is trying to use the Office 2010, or SP14, libraries and this is why I am getting the errors? If yes, can I fix this without having to uninstall Office 2010? 

Thanks,

Hi R_Popescu,

This forum is to discuss problems of VS Extensibility but your question is not related to the topic of this forum.

And I would move this thread to SharePoint forum and you would get more efficient responses there. Thanks for your understanding!

Hi,

According to the error message, I suggest to uninstall the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 and the Office Developer Tools, then download the latest release of Office Developer Tools and install again using the Web Platform Installer.

Here is a post with the similar problem can be helpful:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/ff453e57-9a2c-4307-962a-ecc4963bc13c/sharepoint-not-installed-error-while-creating-sharepoint-2013-empty-project

best regards

Hi Patrick,

I went through the steps of uninstalling/installing the Office Developer Tools for VS 2012, following the link you provided as well, and my system behaves the same. There are no event messages errors on my machine.

I am not sure where to look next. Do you have any other ideas?

Thanks, Radu

Hi,

Are you trying to build full trust solution or SharePoint apps? If you are developing full trust solution then you need to have SharePoint 2013 installed in the same machine. However in case of apps development, you don't need to install SharePoint but wherever the SharePoint installed, apps settings need to be configured for the site and the site template should be developer template. Which Visual Studio template you are using to create the project?

Thanks, Sohel. This clarifies a few things for the long run effort. We are correctly setup to develop apps, and full trust solutions are not on the table yet.  

My question is more simple, and I think we are looking for a basic knowledge piece. From our reading, we understand that SharePoint Designer 2013 is more limited than previous versions. Withing this perspective, Microsoft is steering developers towards Visual Studio, which we would like to use for development, indeed. 

How do we open SharePoint 2013 site in Visual Studio 2012? When trying to open a SharePoint 2013 web site from Visual Studio, we get this error: "Error opening web <site>. Visual Web Developer does not support opening SharePoint web sites. See Help for more details." Clicking on Help does not help at all - that target page does not cover anything related to SharePoint. I should have started the thread with this, but thought that all connections to SharePoint are using the same libraries or apps installed on my client development machine. In previous Visual Studio version, this error pointed to erroneous libraries being loaded, but I can't find any errors on the system at all.  

If this error is by design, do I tell developers to use a tool such as Dreamweaver to edit the SharePoint 2013 sites' HTML/CSS/design? It seems silly since we are trying to use all Microsoft tools. Also, I would rather not develop in SharePoint Designer 2013. 

Thanks. 

Hi Radu,

SharePoint Designer was more limited always compared to Visual Studio and I think it's no way a favorite tools (few included below):

• Direct customisation not favored by most Farm admins through SharePoint Designer.
• It's a buggy tool (maybe the most buggy tools ever from MS)
• Customisation was difficult to package from one environment to another
• Restriction with its abilities.

It's not easy to use any third party tools like Dreamweaver with SharePoint as SharePoint is not just html and css, it's a framework with so many connected systems.

Anyway, you are getting the error because I think you can only use Visual Studio in SharePoint Server to browse SharePoint contents not from a pc where SharePoint is not installed.