Creating a Sharepoint Development Environment from an Existing Production Environment

Question

I have very little experience using Sharepoint but a good amount using Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 and IIS6.

I need to create a development environment for a SharePoint 2007 system that will be used internally. The system is already deployed over two servers - one of the servers simply holds the database and everything else is on the other server. We are also using WSS 3.0.

I have created a Virtual Machine with all the required software including a clean installation of SharePoint Server 2007 and I wish to use this single Virtual Machine as the development environment.

Right now there are no custom assemblies being used on the production server as far as I am aware. There are 3 websites, one over port 80 for user accesss, one over a custom port for central administration, and one over another custom port. Not sure what the last one is for but my blank instance of Sharepoint on my Virtual Machine also has something similar.

I attempted to use the STSADM tool to backup and restore these 3 sites from my production environment to my development environment and while the operations completed succesfully, the central administration site in my development environment acted strangely and I could not access port 80 - I did not seem to have correct credentials for it.

I suspected that it would not have been so simple so could I please have advice on how to create my development environment so that I can use it to deploy updates to the production one.

Answer 1

Unless you need to pull back content from SharePoint I'm not sure you will need to copy the production database (Content specifically) back to the development environment.

In general SharePoint is fairly similar to application development in that the process will go something like:

1. Develop your capability using the SharePoint object model and your IDE
2. Create a WSP package.
3. Deploy the WSP package to SharePoint (either dev or production).

If you are using Visual Studio I would suggest using on of the Add-Ins available to build your WSPs (WSPBuilder or VSEWSS). They will also allow you to deploy them to your dev SharePoint instance.

To install your WSP(s) to production I would suggest looking at using the SharePoint installer available on CodePlex. Although you can accomplish the same thing using the STSADM tool.