If you are a developer for SharePoint your best friend has been Virtual PC or VMWare. It’s time to introduce a new friend, Bamboo Nation’s SharePointOnVista.
Bamboo have put together an installer that allows you to install WSS3.0 SP1 on Vista, both x86 and x64. This will allow you to develop on your workstation with all the power of a non virtualized environment. You still need VPC and VMWare so don’t feel sorry.
There’s been much discussion about SharePoint being a “bad” development platform. This will remove the objection that you NEED to develop on a Server OS. I think we all as SharePoint developers have built our “virtualization skills” to a comfortable level now so it’s time to give us a break
You can download the setup helper and try it out.
If you are installing on Windows 7 RC (build 7100) you need to read this post before continuing.
Current limitations:
- You must select the Advanced option during install.
- If you want to run on SQLExpress, manually install it first. Get it here.
- You have to manually enable IIS7 with the proper options (explained).
