This post provides you with two alternatives for testing and/or developing SharePoint and getting your environment setup quick and easy.
Recently I downloaded the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (that’s a long name!!!)
I found it useful for showcasing features and feature discovery around the whole collaboration and IW initiative that Microsoft envisioned for the 2010 release.
Products included are:
- SharePoint 2010 Enterprise
- Project Server 2010
- Office Communications Server 2007 R2
- Visual Studio 2010
- Office Professional Plus 2010
- Office Visio 2010
- Office Project 2010
- SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition
- Exchange Server 2010 (additional VM)
The main issue, in my opinion is that since it’s got the “whole nine yards” it may be a little bloated for development, specially if you are running the VM on a 8 gb Laptop. In addition, the VM is a Hyper-V VM and therefore you must use Windows Server 2008 R2 (as specified in the System Requirements).
The other alternative that was just released for setting up a development environments is the SharePoint Easy Setup Script for Developers.
What’s included as OOB install:
- SharePoint Server 2010 + pre-requisites (Standalone)
- Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition
- Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio
- Expression Studio 4 Ultimate
- Open XML SDK
- Visual Studio SDK
- Visual Studio SharePoint Power Tools
- Office 2010 Professional Plus
- SharePoint Designer 2010
- Visio 2010
As you can see this is more developer oriented and focused just on SharePoint so I believe it will make a better dev. environment.
This script will take care or installing and configuring all pre-requisites and products to get you ready to do SharePoint development on a Windows 7 environment, could be on the metal, could be a VM using the VHD Native boot feature, which i will blog about in the near future.
The script will download and install evaluation copies of the products or use your fully licenced products if you provide them.
I will make a test of this and will get back to you!
For a detailed how to guide on how SharePoint Easy Setup works check out Chris Johnson’s blog post
