I feel like such a noob! As you can see from my profile, I'm not ... I've been developing with Visual Studio and C# for more than 10 years now. But, I've never done a thing with SharePoint. I'm a partner in a start-up company (and as you probably know, start-ups have absolutely no money coming in -- or at least ours doesn't yet). Another company who we've partnered with (for things other than SharePoint) has had an unexpected loss of one of their key SharePoint developers. Mutually beneficial to both of our companies is for them to hire me to fill the shoes of the departed developer. They know that I have absolutely no experience with SharePoint, but they know I'm a fast learner. OK, enough with the introduction. Now let's get to the point. I'm going to need to use Visual Studio 2010 to develop for a SharePoint 2007 app. I'll eventually get more of the specifics from our partner company next week, but I wanted to try and at least get a working development environment set up this week. But, I have no idea what I need to download and install. I watched a video on Pluralsight and noted that in order to get Intellisense to work in VS for the Features.xml file, it was necessary to copy stuff from "web server extensions\12". I have that folder on my main development computer (although it's got nothing in it but a \Bin folder). However, I'm trying to get all this set up on a VM (so I don't screw up my normal development machine) and that VM doesn't even have the "web server extensions" folder. I have no idea what has to be installed in order for that to show up. My VM has VS 2010 installed (and I included the options for SharePoint stuff and Web Developer with the VS install). I also installed the SharePoint SDK. I'm sure I'm missing something, but have no idea what at this point. Can someone point me to a list of what needs to be installed and in what order? Obviously, I'll need SharePoint Server at some point, but I've got plenty of VMs I can put that on and I'm not currently worried about that one. My first priority is setting up the development VM (which is Windows 7).~~Bonnie Berent DeWitt [C# MVP] geek-goddess-bonnie.blogspot.com

Hi Bonnie, Welcome to SharePoint world. You can find the installation steps on Windows 7 at Bamboosolutions and MSDN blog: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2009/05/07/installing-wss-3-0-moss-sp2-on-windows-7-rc.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2009/05/07/running-sharepoint-on-windows-7.aspx By the way, it is always recommended to install this on a Virtual environment, without disturbing your primary OS. Do not forget to get the SP2 or SP3 bits of SharePoint 2007 for your setup. Help this helps Thanks & Regards, Kamlesh | Blog | Twitter | Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Bonnie -- First of all, please keep in mind that I'm a SharePoint admin, not a developer, so I may not be completely fluent in my explanation but I hopefully will still be able to give you enough info to get you headed in the right starting direction... My overall recommendation to you would to not try to do SharePoint development on a computer running Visual Studio that doesn't also have SharePoint 2010 installed on the computer. There are probably quite a few reasons why this would be an issue, but for me the biggest ones are: You have to have certain SharePoint files present on your computer in order to reference them in your SharePoint projects in VS. Mainly we're talking about the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll file, but there are others as well such as the Features.xml file you mentioned. Now, you can copy those files down from a server running SharePoint 2010 (they will be in <system drive>\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\14\ on a server with SharePoint 2010 installed). NOTE: the Pluralsight video you watched must have been referring to the SharePoint 2007 release if it was talking about <system drive>\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12, SharePoint 2010 uses the 14 folder, not 12. If you're serious about developing SharePoint, its better to put VS on a server running SharePoint 2010 so you can be certain that you have all the files, rather than try to copy some of them down to your dev machine and then later find out that you're missing some.If you want to debug or test any of your code, you're going to need to deploy it to a computer running SharePoint in order to see how it behaves. I'm not saying that you couldn't do this with a remote server, but its much more difficult, especially if you don't have complete control over that server. Its just much more efficient to do your builds, deploys, and tests locally than it is to do it remotely. Ok, that being said I would recommend the following things: Build a Windows Server 2008 R2 VMInstall SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition on itInstall Visual Studio 2010 on itThen install SharePoint 2010 on it. The trick here is to do the farm build without Active Directory by creating your farm's Config Database with PowerShell and then joining to it via the farm config wizard (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=112 has info on how to do it). This post has some good starting info in it, and more importantly it provides a ton of great links that I'd recommend taking a look at to figure out how to set up the VM specifically for SharePoint development: https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/devwiki/SP2010Dev/Pages/Building%20a%20SharePoint%202010%20Development%20machine.aspx JohnMCITP and MCTS: SharePoint, Virtualization, Project Server 2007 My books on Amazon: The SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide and The SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide. My blog: My Central Admin.

Bonnie -- First of all, please keep in mind that I'm a SharePoint admin, not a developer, so I may not be completely fluent in my explanation but I hopefully will still be able to give you enough info to get you headed in the right starting direction... My overall recommendation to you would to not try to do SharePoint development on a computer running Visual Studio that doesn't also have SharePoint 2010 installed on the computer. There are probably quite a few reasons why this would be an issue, but for me the biggest ones are: You have to have certain SharePoint files present on your computer in order to reference them in your SharePoint projects in VS. Mainly we're talking about the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll file, but there are others as well such as the Features.xml file you mentioned. Now, you can copy those files down from a server running SharePoint 2010 (they will be in <system drive>\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\14\ on a server with SharePoint 2010 installed). NOTE: the Pluralsight video you watched must have been referring to the SharePoint 2007 release if it was talking about <system drive>\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12, SharePoint 2010 uses the 14 folder, not 12. If you're serious about developing SharePoint, its better to put VS on a server running SharePoint 2010 so you can be certain that you have all the files, rather than try to copy some of them down to your dev machine and then later find out that you're missing some.If you want to debug or test any of your code, you're going to need to deploy it to a computer running SharePoint in order to see how it behaves. I'm not saying that you couldn't do this with a remote server, but its much more difficult, especially if you don't have complete control over that server. Its just much more efficient to do your builds, deploys, and tests locally than it is to do it remotely. Ok, that being said I would recommend the following things: Build a Windows Server 2008 R2 VMInstall SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition on itInstall Visual Studio 2010 on itThen install SharePoint 2010 on it. The trick here is to do the farm build without Active Directory by creating your farm's Config Database with PowerShell and then joining to it via the farm config wizard (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=112 has info on how to do it). This post has some good starting info in it, and more importantly it provides a ton of great links that I'd recommend taking a look at to figure out how to set up the VM specifically for SharePoint development: https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/devwiki/SP2010Dev/Pages/Building%20a%20SharePoint%202010%20Development%20machine.aspx JohnMCITP and MCTS: SharePoint, Virtualization, Project Server 2007 My books on Amazon: The SharePoint 2010 Disaster Recovery Guide and The SharePoint 2007 Disaster Recovery Guide. My blog: My Central Admin.

John & Kamlesh, Thanks much for your quick replies! Kamlesh, I don't actually *have* to install SharePoint on Windows 7. I only mentioned Win 7 because I happen to be using that on a VM for testing various things. I also have VMs with Windows Server 2008 R2, and if it's easier to install SharePoint on a real server rather than on Win 7, then perhaps I should do that. What I was hoping to avoid was to have to have SharePoint and Visual Studio existing on the same machine (develop with Visual Studio on Win7, deploy to SharePoint on Server 2008 R2). John, I read somewhere while I was Googling stuff this afternoon, that it's ok to copy stuff from a SharePoint server to your development machine (of course, I forgot to bookmark that link!) ... you don't agree, but is that mainly because something might be forgotten or is it because it's not a good idea for other reasons? The Pluralsight video I watched *was* for SharePoint 2007 (hence the \12), but that's fine because the app I will be working on is for a SharePoint 2007 server anyway. But, that brings me to another question ... could I safely develop stuff using SharePoint 2010 and deploy it with no problems to SharePoint 2007? If there might be compatability issues, I should probably install SharePoint 2007 instead of 2010. I really don't forsee myself doing a lot of SharePoint development ... this is only a short-term project that may only be for a month or two (or three). Tomorrow I will start taking a closer look at the links you two have provided. Thanks again for the prompt replies!~~Bonnie Berent DeWitt [C# MVP] geek-goddess-bonnie.blogspot.com

For the question "could I safely develop stuff using SharePoint 2010 and deploy it with no problems to SharePoint 2007?", the answer is no. In such situation, we need to set up a SharePoint 2007 development environment. I don't agree to copy stuff from a SharePoint server to another SharePoint server directly, as there may have some customization in the source SharePoint server, which will cause the target server(or project) to be invalid. Instead, please build a new development machine as mentioned. Thanks, Jinchun ChenJinchun Chen Forum Support Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help. If you have feedback for TechNet Subscriber Support, contact tnmff AT microsoft.com(Please replace AT with @)

Hi guys, I meant to get back to this thread a couple of days ago. As it turns out, shortly after posting my last reply I watched a different Pluralsight video that walked through an installation and it didn't look too bad ;0) ... so I have the necessary steps if need be. But, as it turns out, the guys I'm going to be doing the work for are giving me a VM (created from the departed developer's machine) and so I'll have the whole environment already set up. Thanks for your help!~~Bonnie Berent DeWitt [C# MVP] geek-goddess-bonnie.blogspot.com