Sharepoint/WSS/VS.NET Development Environment

Question

I'm a WSS newbie developer with some ASP.NET dev experience, and am looking to start learning some Sharepoint Web Part development. All the tutorials, VS.NET add-ons and SDK's i've discovered so far require VS.NET 2005/2008 to be running on the same physical box as the WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 server install (hence Windows Server 2003 or 2008). Is that really true?? Isn't there a way to do develop for Sharepoint in VS.NET on a client machine that has access to a WSS server?

Answer 1

Although I don't recommend it, it is possible to copy the SharePoint DLLs to your local XP/Vista machine and develop and compile in Visual Studio, then deploy to a Windows Server, after which you could remote debug. Really though you are better off just doing everything on Windows Server. You can run Virtual PC on XP or Vista and install a Windows 2003 stack then do all of your development that way. I have a 5 year old XP box at home that I run Windows Server 2003 on Virtual PC and it works out just fine for SharePoint development including debugging. One thing I had to do though was install a second hard drive and dedicate that to the virtual machine image. Prior to that it was unbearably slow. The second hard drive cost just $27 (30 GB), but obviously you can spend more if you want.