What OS will you use to develop on with SharePoint 2010?

Question

Here are my thoughts:

I will install WSS 4.0 on my Windows 7 laptop to mainly prototype things quickly in a meeting or design session. However, for real development work I will be using Windows Server 2008 R2.

Does anyone have any plans or preferences? I want to understand the rationale for each.

Answer 1

I agree with you Rob; SharePoint Foundation on my main laptop and then W2K8R2 on VMWare workstation 7 for the heavy development! That is, the same way I do now; WSS 3 on Win7 and MOSS 2007 on VMs; but now it's supported...

Answer 2

I think I will stay on Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V for development.

I used to present from my laptop with Virtual PC and external drive, but since SharePoint 2010 requires a lot of RAM (at least beta does) I am thinking to do demos on my hosted environment.

Answer 3

I'm finding that having Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is great, BUT as Wictor pointed out, I don't install everything on Windows Server 2008 R2, I have a Boot-VHD of Win 7 for all my "normal" work. I'm looking at running Win 7 fully and then just using VMWare Workstation 7 to run VMs up in. Rather than having to "go dark" to spin up VMs in Hyper-V.

I've tried to convert completely to Server 2008 R2 but there are so many bits you miss out on or simply aren't supported (full tablet functionality is one example).

Answer 4

We're waiting for the public beta so we can get our hands on it and try out the various OS/hardware configurations & options as we see them;

1. Direct install to Win 7 on 64bit 8G laptops
2. Install W2008R2 and desktop bits on laptop install direct
3. VMWare on laptops to host 64 bit guest OS and install there/multiple VMs?
4. Ditch laptops and go for desktop specs and try above

A couple of questions that I think we'll need to answer:

1. Is WSS as far as you can go with Win 7?
2. Is it possible to install a complete Sharepoint Server 2010 installation on Win 7? I realise that it may not perform but that's another matter - can it be done?
3. We develop a lot of Performance Point dashboard artefacts - can we deploy build these on Win 7?

I reckon there is likely to be merit in each of these deployment scenarios and like all questions, it will be answered starting with "It depends....."

Answer 5

This time without the Community Wiki tickbox selected!

Do we all think that latop spec is gonna be sufficient? When doing an offite demo, are we going to be back to lugging desktop/tower hardware round again.

I like Tonis idea of demoing from a hosted environment but I have nightmares of turning up at a demo site with the intenet connection being the master of my destiny - scary!