Can sharepoint apps be developed in a Visual Studio 2010 stand alone dev box?

Question

Can Sharepoint apps be developed in a Visual Studio 2010 dev box only or does the dev box need to connect to a Sharepoint server? Can the Sharepoint Server be a stand alone machine (no domain controller between the two machines)?

Answer 1

you can do sharepoint development by copying certain dlls to your local enviroment but to my understanding this is unsupported and the recommended practice is to use a virtual machine or development on the machine in which the service resides.

Answer 2

The best practise for SharePoint development is to use a virtual server that contains the SharePoint install itself (and a copy of the portal you're working with), because assuming you are programming directly against the SP API, you will need to be executing your code on the machine that contains the Sharepoint installation itself.

You can program against SharePoint from a non-SharePoint machine through the use of the standard set of SharePoint web services provided, and you can of course create your own services (again sitting on the SP box/VM) to interrogate too. The catch to this approach is that you'll be dealing with return types that are primitive or XML based and you won't have the luxury of SP objects, for example SPUser, SPSite, etc, but for simple query operations at least this is not a bad approach.

IMHO, however, you've far greater flexbility programming against the API itself (Microsoft.Sharepoint.dll) so I'd advise you to get a VM going with all the necessary installs. Yes, it's a pain and time-consuming to set up, but well worth it.

As for Stand-alone options: SharePoint 2007 is not supported on anything non-server in terms of OS, so you'll need something like Server 2008 in order for it to work. SharePoint 2010, however, whilst claiming to only work on Server 2008, can actually work on Windows 7 (Pro and above) with a few hacks. You also have the benefit of 'sandbox' feature deployment in 2010, where you don't in 2007, meaning dev work is more cleanly isolated and less of a risk to a farm as a whole.

Good luck!

Answer 3

You can develop for SharePoint 2010 using VS 2010 using a stand alone setup - this is supported by Microsoft and very much recomended. Infact most of the tools built into VS2010 that will make your life significantly easier will only work with a local copy of SharePoint 2010.

MSDN - Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7...

Answer 4

Yes, if you have Windows 7 or Vista (you need WAS - Windows Activation Services). We have tried it but found that it was better to develop on a Windows 2008 with your own AD.

It will depend on what you are developing, for webparts you will not notice the difference. You will notice the difference when working on the security part og the app.

Sahil Maliks book has a whole chapter on the different options.