- Set up a SharePoint 2010 development environment - Mon, Sep 3 2012
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Many companies are happy with the features SharePoint provides out of the box. Usually the only customization they want to do is change the webpage layouts and design to make them go along with their corporate design. For this purpose, they have a production SharePoint farm and one for test purposes. The customizations are done with SharePoint Designer on the test farm, and after they have been tested thoroughly they are rolled out to the production farm. But, more often than not, the day comes when SharePoint Designer isn’t enough and the SharePoint developer has to take the next step up to Visual Studio.
No big deal. The developer probably has Visual Studio installed on her computer. So she starts it and creates a new SharePoint Project. The window that pops up now is not the expected UI but an error message, which says that a local SharePoint 2010 installation is needed. If she uses a Desktop OS on her machine, she now has a problem because SharePoint 2010 is only supported on Server OS.
But there is a simple way around it. I’ll show you what steps are necessary to get your SharePoint 2010 development environment running on Windows 7. It is also possible to run SharePoint on Windows Vista—you just have to install some more packages. Windows XP is not supported.
First, you have to copy the files from your installation medium to a folder on your hard disk (e.g., C:\SharePointInstall). If you have a single compressed executable file, you have to copy it into the folder and extract it:
C:\SharePointInstall\SharePointServer /extract:C:\SharePointInstall
Now comes the important part. You have to change the config.xml file in the directory c:\SharePointInstallation\files\Setup\config.xml. Just open the file with Notepad and add the following line between the <configuration> tags:
<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>
This line is pretty self-explanatory: It tells the setup routine that it has the permission to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7.
You aren’t done yet. A drawback of this hack is that you can’t use the setup routine to install the prerequisites. You have to do so manually. Depending on the configuration of your machine, you have to install the following packets:
- Microsoft FilterPack 2.0 (found here: C:\SharePointInstallation\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\FilterPack\FilterPack.msi)
- Microsoft Sync Framework
- SQL Server Native Client
- Windows Identity Foundation (Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu)
- Chart Controls (not required for SharePoint Foundation 2010)
- SQL Server Analysis Services - ADOMD.Net (not required for SharePoint Foundation 2010)
The last step you have to take is to configure the Internet Information Services on your computer. Just open the Programs and Features Control Panel and turn on the IIS features shown in the following screenshot.
