It’s almost a year after release of SharePoint 2010 and momentum is still building around the platform. If you’ve worked with previous versions, but are just coming around to 2010 today, you’ve got some great options for getting up to speed quickly. If you’re a developer, you probably need more than the average SharePoint professional
Do you want to build on bare metal, in VMWare, HyperV or use the cloud? The quickest way anymore is to use cloudshare.com. I’ll make that Option 1:
- Check out the VMs you can start instantly at http://www.cloudshare.com/solutions/sharepoint-development-environment.aspx I’m using the $50/month plan for a lot of my development and testing, but I also use VMWare.
- There’s a decent 20 page walkthrough on MSDN if you want to go the manual way: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx Keep in mind you need a 64bit host and as much memory as possible. My 6GB laptop with 4 GB’s assigned to the VM creeps along slowly, especially with Visual Studio running. The 12GB I have on my desktop makes a much better host.
- You can also download the preconfigured IW VM from Microsoft. It has everything turned on with Office, SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio installed. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=21099
- By default this VM will run in Hyper-V. You’ve got to jump through some hoops to get it to run in VMWare, but it’s not impossible. Of course there’s always CloudShare’s On Demand instance to fall back too, Option 1 above.
Leave a Reply