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Table of Contents




Introduction

When you create or customize SharePoint 2010 solutions, it is usually best to develop the solution on a local computer where Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 or Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 is installed: this article describes how to install a development environment with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. The development environment that you create by using these instructions will support SharePoint 2010 farm installations and is almost equal to a SharePoint 2010 production environment, because it will use Windows Server 2008 features like Active Directory and a robust DMBS server like SQL Server 2008. These instructions enable you to get started with an environment that is specifically suited to developing SharePoint custom solutions.
If you want to set up a simpler development environment that allows you to build SharePoint 2010 solutions without installing a "close to real" server environment (for example, if you want to use a client Windows version or if you do not have a SQL Server installation), you can read the article "SharePoint 2010: How to Set Up a Development Environment".

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Hardware and Software Requirements

Creating a "close to production" SharePoint development environment imposes high hardware and software requirements: the development machine will host the web front end, the database server and the development tools provided by Microsoft Visual Studio, thus having a serious impact on the system's performance. According to the TechNet Library's "Hardware and software requirements (SharePoint Server 2010)" document, you'll need a machine with the following characteristics

All the required software programs needed to set up the environment are available as trial versions that can be downloaded for free from the following links:

Such a configuration can be set up by using either a physical machine or a virtualized on: in the second case you'll have several advantages, including the possibility to take snapshots of the configured machine (thus allowing you to revert back to a previous well functioning state in case of a problem) and to clone the machine to set up a training enviroment for SharePoint developers, but this will require either using the trial versions of the mentioned softwares or having multiple license of each of them.

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Step 1: Operating System Installation and Configuration

 

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Step 2: SQL Server Installation

 

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Step 3: SharePoint 2010 Server Installation

 

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Step 4: Visual Studio 2010 and Developer Documentation Installation

If you don't have installed Visual Studio 2010 (not Express edition), this is the right moment to do that. After installing Visual Studio, you have to download and install the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK; do not forget to check for the availability of updates for the Visual Studio products and documentation. Now you're ready to develop SharePoint 2010 applications.

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See Also

NOTE: the following links are external to TechNet Wiki.

Books

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This article is also available in the following languages:

Italian (it-IT)