Sunday, June 20, 2010

Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

A great post from Dahnesh's Blog.
 
Some of you may want to install SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2010 Foundation on Windows 7 for development and testing purposes. I have also managed to do so and thought I would quickly share some of the key steps for this setup.

Firstly, the article I referred to for this setup is here and here are the steps I followed:

1. Ensure that you have Windows 7 x64 edition and SQL Server 2008 R2 x64 installed on your . The SQL Server 2008 R2 installation can be the Developer Edition or the Express Edition, whichever is relevant in your case.

2. Copy all the SharePoint setup files to c:\sharepointfiles folder and then open the config.xml file from c:\sharepointfiles\files\setup using notepad. In this file, add the following line

<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>

Ensure that you add this line anywhere between <Configuration> and </Configuration> tags. Save the file after you add this line.

3. Install the following components

    a. Windows Identity Foundation (Click Here) – Install the "Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu" file

    b. Chart Controls (Click Here) – not required if you're planning to install SharePoint 2010 Foundation

4. Install the required "Windows Features" by pasting the following text in the command prompt and then press "Enter" (ensure that this is a single line, no breaks) – better way is to paste this in notepad and ensure that "word wrap" is off and then paste this into the command prompt.

start /w pkgmgr /iu:IIS-WebServerRole;IIS-WebServer;IIS-CommonHttpFeatures;IIS-StaticContent;IIS-DefaultDocument;IIS-DirectoryBrowsing;IIS-HttpErrors;IIS-ApplicationDevelopment;IIS-ASPNET;IIS-NetFxExtensibility;IIS-ISAPIExtensions;IIS-ISAPIFilter;IIS-HealthAndDiagnostics;IIS-HttpLogging;IIS-LoggingLibraries;IIS-RequestMonitor;IIS-HttpTracing;IIS-CustomLogging;IIS-ManagementScriptingTools;IIS-Security;IIS-BasicAuthentication;IIS-WindowsAuthentication;IIS-DigestAuthentication;IIS-RequestFiltering;IIS-Performance;IIS-HttpCompressionStatic;IIS-HttpCompressionDynamic;IIS-WebServerManagementTools;IIS-ManagementConsole;IIS-IIS6ManagementCompatibility;IIS-Metabase;IIS-WMICompatibility;WAS-WindowsActivationService;WAS-ProcessModel;WAS-NetFxEnvironment;WAS-ConfigurationAPI;WCF-HTTP-Activation;WCF-NonHTTP-Activation

5. You can now run the Setup.exe from the SharePoint installation files and proceed as a normal installation

You can also refer to the article I mentioned earlier (here) from which I have successfully installed SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Foundation on Windows 7 x64 (Enterprise Edition).

Friday, June 18, 2010

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools

The Visual Studio team that brought you the SharePoint developer tools in Visual Studio 2010 is happy to announce we have created a set of power tools that make developing SharePoint 2010 sandboxed solutions even easier.  Below is the list of features included in the current release of the power tools.

Sandboxed-compatible Visual Web Part 

This item template enables you to use a visual designer to create SharePoint web parts that can be deployed in a SharePoint 2010 sandboxed solution.

Sandboxed Compilation 

This extension displays build errors when you use types or members in a SharePoint 2010 sandboxed project which are not allowed in the SharePoint sandbox environment.

The Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools are available immediately on the Visual Studio Gallery.

VSeWSS Import Tool for Visual Studio 2010

SharePoint VSeWSS Import tool is an add-in to Visual Studio 2010 and it adds a new SharePoint project template for importing a VSeWSS project. "VSeWSS or Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services are Microsoft tools for creating SharePoint 2007 projects on VS2008. In VS2010 we've built in tools for creating SharePoint 2010 projects. This import tool takes a VSeWSS project that's targetted at SharePoint 2007 and migrates it to VS2010 where it's targetted at SharePoint 2010.

The import tool is distributed as source code so you'll need to compile it before using it. There's a batch file provided for this and you just need VS2010 installed and to run batch file. The import tool works at the project level, not the solution level. So if you've a solution with multiple projects you'll need to import them one by one and get them all going," revealed Microsoft.

More info and download Url: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/VSeWSSImport

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Microsoft Sharepoint – Benefits For A Sharepoint Developer

Sharepoint developers today have a vast choice of applications to choose from. One of the best options though is Microsoft Sharepoint. This application has helped Sharepoint developers perform tasks easily and at a much more reasonable cost as the time involvement is also reduced. Microsoft SharePoint helps SharePoint developers to perform tasks related to business applications, corporate search engines, content management systems and business intelligence tools. This application not only helps a Sharepoint developer; but also creates websites and manages web contents. Sharepoint developers can now develop programs for organization to perform across several locations at one place. This can provide a systematic workflow and help organizations perform better. Sharepoint developers can also help employees in an organization share and work together on documents with the help of Microsoft Sharepoint. This application also provides Sharepoint developer's useful business intelligence tools which they can put to use at various levels. The application is very compactable and Sharepoint developers have no problem in interagrating them with Microsoft products such as office, excel, exchange and internet explorer. This helps Sharepoint developers take the concept of the web to a total new level.

Microsoft Sharepoint has taken Sharepoint development to a whole new level and increased the potential of Sharepoint developers. With the increase of Sharepoint taking over almost all industries in the market today; the application has been very popular among Sharepoint developers and has also generated major revenues.

Sharepoint developers now prefer the Microsoft application as this is gaining huge popularity with all industries. Some famous applications Sharepoint developers have created with the application include Congos which is a business intelligence software maker.

This application also has a major scope for improvement and can add some enhancements to it. Sharepoint developers are growing as the Sharepoint market is growing tremendously across the World Wide Web. Sharepoint looks very promising and with applications like Microsoft Sharepoint; Sharepoint developers are beginning to get more and more in demand. SharePoint developers can change the traditional methods into more contemporary and friendly methods due to the help given by Microsoft to SharePoint.

Friday, June 4, 2010

SharePoint Q&A: Microsoft's Arpan Shah

Microsoft on May 12 released Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. You can read the Visual Studio Magazine cover feature here . While the Office launch is certainly notable, the impact of SharePoint 2010 on .NET developers is potentially huge. The combination of Visual Studio 2010 (launched in April) and SharePoint 2010 has transformed SharePoint application development from an often-frustrating challenge into a first-class development experience.

Arpan Shah, director of SharePoint Tools and Technologies at Microsoft, talked with us about the new version and its impact on developers. You can find useful information about SharePoint 2010 training and resources in this blog entry by Arpan Shah. For a bit more on the Office side of the launch, check out this blog entry from Microsoft Senior Product Manager John R. Durant.

Michael Desmond: Microsoft has admitted that it had work to do to get SharePoint-based development up to grade with other platforms. What in your mind were the most critical areas that needed to be addressed to make SharePoint developers first-class citizens in the .NET development space?
Arpan Shah: We've made a number of investments for SharePoint developers across the board. One I would call out is our SharePoint developer tools in Visual Studio 2010 that make it very easy for developers to code and debug SharePoint solutions quickly. In addition, we also support Windows Vista SP2 and Windows 7 as SharePoint development environments. These two investment areas plus many more really bring SharePoint development in line with the other types of .NET development, which is great for developers.

MD: I've heard lots of devs rave about two things that got fixed with Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010: The ability to develop on a Visual Studio workstation, and the addition of F5 build/debug/deploy. How difficult was it to enable these important capabilities with SharePoint 2010?
AS: We listened to our developer community and prioritized our engineering efforts to enable these key developer scenarios. Support for the Windows client as a developer environment was possible because of the similarity of the IIS codebase in Windows Vista SP2/Windows 7 and Windows Server. It's important to point out that there are limitations when developing on the Windows Client, so we recommend that developers use Windows Server for a full developer experience across all the SharePoint Server 2010 features. Support for Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools was possible because of the partnership with and hard work by the Visual Studio team.

MD: Business Connectivity Services are getting a lot of attention as a key ingredient in the SharePoint (and Office) update. Can you explain why SharePoint oriented developers might want to explore BCS more closely?
AS: Business Connectivity Services (BCS) really takes away the need to do a lot of the plumbing and heavy lifting a developer typically needs to do in order to integrate with another backend system. Developers can use BCS to connect SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 to databases and/or other line of business (LOB) systems such as Microsoft CRM and SAP to surface data to end users. End users can read, edit and take the data offline. BCS connections can be set up declaratively through SharePoint Designer 2010 as well as developed in Visual Studio 2010.

MD: What are you hearing from .NET developers since SharePoint 2010 launched? Are you seeing SharePoint development shops moving immediately to Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 in lockstep?
AS: We are receiving great feedback from the developer community. Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 are helping SharePoint developers rapidly develop & debug SharePoint projects reducing overall time-to-market for their SharePoint solutions. With good developer training available, we're seeing SharePoint developers upgrade their SharePoint 2007 skills to SharePoint 2010. Many development shops are starting new projects with Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 as well as working with their existing customers to upgrade them to SharePoint 2010 to take advantage of all the investments made.

MD: If you could do the whole SharePoint 2010 cycle over again, what one thing might you change and how?
AS: We have a really great tools story with Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and we know there is more we can do to build on that great experience. Looking back, I think we got the priorities right on what to do first, but it's hard not to look at the additional things we would like to have done and wonder what if. It just gives us more excitement about what will come next!

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