Setting up your PC for SharePoint 2010 development

If you’ve been following our blog lately, you would’ve noticed a series of articles about Office 365. It is no secret that Office 365 will help move Office to the cloud and as developers we need to gear up for it.

As I’ve mentioned before a major part of Office 365 is SharePoint and in this article I’ll walk you through the process of preparing your PC’s development environment. Visual Studio 2010 has very nice integration with SharePoint 2010 and makes it very easy for developers to develop, deploy, test and debug their SharePoint solutions. In order to be able to use the SharePoint tools in Visual Studio, your development machine needs to have Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 installed.

Fortunately you can install SharePoint on Windows 7 and Vista, as long as it is the 64-bit versions. We’ll walk through the necessary steps in order to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7.

Prerequisites

Next, we need to install the necessary prerequisites that SharePoint 2010 requires. If you do not have SQL Server and Visual Studio 2010 already installed, please do so now. In most cases installing SQL Server and Visual Studio should also install these two prerequisites:

• Microsoft Sync framework and
• SQL Server Native Client.

Also, if you do not already have it installed install the following:

• Chart Controls;
• Microsoft FilterPack 2.0, which can be found in the PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\FilterPack folder;
• SQL Server Analysis Services; and
• Windows Identity Foundation.

If you’re not using SQL Server 2008 R2 make sure you have Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 installed before proceeding.

Next, you need to make sure all the required Windows features are enabled. To do this go to Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features and click on the Turn Windows features on or off link.

SharePoint Installation

The default installation of SharePoint 2010 does not work on Windows 7 so you need to edit a configuration file and install the prerequisites manually. I will assume you have a SharePoint installation disc or an ISO image downloaded from your Microsoft MSDN account.

First, copy all the files from the installation disc to a folder on your local drive. Once all the files are copied to a local folder, in my case it is C:\SharePoint, double-click the setup.exe file. You will be presented with the following message:

To get around this, open the config.xml file in the Files\Setup folder and add the following setting inside the <Configuration> tag:

<Setting Id=”AllowWindowsClientInstall” Value=”True”/>

Run setup.exe again and you will be prompted to enter your SharePoint Product key and accept the terms of use. When prompted to choose the installation, select Standalone.

The SharePoint installation will start.

Configuration Wizard

After the installation has completed successfully you need to start the SharePoint Products and Technologies. Do this by browsing to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN folder and running psconfigui.exe

You will receive a warning that Windows 7 is not supported as a production environment for SharePoint 2010. Click OK to continue. Also, when prompted to restart a number of services click Yes. The configuration wizard will start.

Once the configuration wizard has completed it will automatically take you to your new SharePoint site.

Next, download the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools. It is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that amongst other things contains an item template for a sandboxed Web part for use with SharePoint Online. The last and very important tool you must install is SharePoint Designer 2010. This free download makes it very easy to quickly add new lists, forms, workflows and much, much more to SharePoint.

You are now ready to start developing for SharePoint!

Thank you for reading. Until next time, keep coding!

You may also be interested in:

• SharePoint Ribbon UI customization with Ribbon Designer for SharePoint and Office 365
• Article: Office 365 from a developers' point of view
• Video: What is Office 365 from a developer's perspective?
• Video: Office 365 customization and setup