Issues with SharePoint 2010 Development

Question

I am planning to use my laptop for SharePoint 2010 development and I have only 4 GB RAM which is not even upgradable. Just because of RAM constraint, my VS 2010 keeps crawling if I try to run it along with SharePoint 2010 on the same machine.

Hence, I've reformatted my machine and looking for alternate solutions until I get a new laptop. Currently, I have installed VS 2010 ONLY on my laptop and wanted to create an empty SharePoint project. Once done with my project, I want to deploy it on a different machine (which is a 4GB RAM machine as well, but contains only SharePoint 2010). I thought this will work and give me a bit of breather if everything is configured well. Unfortunately, when I tried creating a new SharePoint Empty Project in VS 2010, it says...

A SharePoint server is not installed on this computer. A SharePoint server must be installed to work with SharePoint projects.

Is there a way out?

Answer 1

Have you tried only installing SharePoint Foundation? That should have a smaller footprint.

It should be noted that you may not be able to develop against all of the things you need, but should be good if you are only doing WebPart dev.

Answer 2

If you are using SQL Server, you can limit it's memory consumption. This helped us quite a bit until we upgraded to 6GB of RAM.

You can also limit the number of service applications that you configure as well. Of course this will depend on what you are actually trying to do.

Answer 3

If you are on Windows 7 you could try the Boot into VHD option http://www.ditii.com/2010/03/19/native-boot-to-vhd-in-windows-server-2008-r2-and-windows-7-screencast/

Answer 4

I tried it the way @Shankar suggested, and got it working. I must tell that the experience is really much better and I am gonna recommend that as well. I blogged about it at http://www.dotnetscraps.com/dotnetscraps/post/SharePoint-2010-Set-up-your-development-environment-for-Windows-7-using-Boot-from-VHD-1-semi-automated-way-with-scripts.aspx