I have been working with the new SharePoint 2007 technologies for a bit of time now. It's a great step forward and my clients are very excited about it. One of the somewhat annoying aspects of doing development work against this platform is that both WSS 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 are server products and will not install on a client OS. According to developer documentation, it is advised that development be done on the server itself.
Some very helpful people out there, among them Jonathan Bradshaw and Bil Simser, both of whom have very good advice about how to go about setting up virtual machines on which one develops...but wait, I already spent 20+ cumulative hours setting up my development environment on my client OS, and thought it a bit silly to have to go through that again when I want to do everything on my laptop with 1.5 GB of RAM.
So I set out to find out what steps I would have to take in order to leverage my existing development environment on my Windows XP-based laptop without having to do my development itself on a server or on a virtual machine hosted on my computer.
It took me a bit of time, but I did succeed in my quest and this post is about sharing with you what I did to make things work. Disclaimer: Note that this approach is not an officially supported configuration from Microsoft.
Required Assemblies
To write code against the SharePoint 2007 server, one requires the appropriate references. These include the following DLLs:
- Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.Udf.dll
- Microsoft.Office.Excel.Server.WebServices.dll
- Microsoft.Office.Policy.dll
- Microsoft.Office.Server.dll
- Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.dll
- microsoft.office.workflow.tasks.dll
- Microsoft.SharePoint.dll
- Microsoft.SharePoint.Dsp.dll
- Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.dll
- microsoft.sharepoint.portal.dll
- Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.SingleSignon.dll
- Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.SingleSignon.Security.dll
- Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll
- Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.dll
- Microsoft.SharePoint.Security.dll
- microsoft.sharepoint.WorkflowActions.dll
To gain access to these DLLs, one must install MOSS on a server. I found most of these DLLs in the following location, once the server was installed: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI. However, two of them, namely Microsoft.SharePoint.Dsp.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.dll were not in this location (and yet my VS.NET project complained it needed them). For those, I extracted the dlls from the Global Assembly Cache at the command line, as described in this thread.
Well, THAT was fun!
But wait, there's more. I also like having intellisense when typing up the XML files that are used as part of deploying SharePoint 2007 features, so I copied the following XSD schemas to my local drive as well:
- CamlQuery.xsd
- CamlView.xsd
- CoreDefinitions.xsd
- DeploymentExportSettings.xsd
- DeploymentLookupListMap.xsd
- DeploymentManifest.xsd
- DeploymentRequirements.xsd
- DeploymentRootObjectMap.xsd
- DeploymentSystemData.xsd
- DeploymentUserGroupMap.xsd
- DeploymentViewFormsList.xsd
- wss.xsd
These were located on the server in this location: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML
And finally, I had already downloaded and installed the ECM Starter Kit, which, in the README, contains instructions for adding some helpful code snippets that are used in building feature.xml and workflow.xml files.
Now, there are some tradeoffs to having the development environment on my client machine. The main one is that since there is no WSS 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 on my machine so I have to copy everything to the server (or have my build copy it to a share on the server, but still...).
Despite that setback, I am much happier being able to continue working happily on my non-server laptop to do my development work.