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I would like to begin SharePoint 2010 development, and I'd prefer to do it on my Windows 7 Professional 64-bit desktop, or my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit laptop.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a comprehensive guide to installing it. Has anyone done this successfully, and if so, where are the instructions you used?

To all who answered: I'm not ignoring you. I'm waiting on having the chance to try your advice before awarding one of the answers as the accepted one.

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6 Answers 6

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You don't need any guidance, since they have SharePoint 2010 Easy Setup Script:

The SharePoint 2010 Easy Setup Script is a new set of pre-packaged tools that help developers easily get started with SharePoint 2010 development by automating the provisioning of a developer workstation using Windows 7, SharePoint & associated tools.

...

Out of the box it will help you install:

  • SharePoint Server 2010 + pre-requisites (Standalone)
  • Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition
  • Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio
  • Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Open XML
  • SDK Visual Studio SDK Visual Studio
  • SharePoint Power Tools Office 2010 Professional Plus
  • SharePoint Designer 2010 Visio 2010
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  • I'm currently trying Easy Setup. I find it has some issues and I needed to debug the script to fix them. When there's a problem installing a prereq, it doesn't tell you what the problem was. For instance, I had a later version of Sync Framework installed, so that just failed. I had a similar problem with WIF, so that failed too. I just now set a breakpoint in the script and removed all prereqs, and it's now trying to install the server.
    – John Saunders
    Jun 24, 2011 at 15:26
  • I accepted this answer, not because the others didn't work, but because this one did work, eventually.
    – John Saunders
    Jun 25, 2011 at 15:02
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This guide on MSDN tells you pretty much everything you need to know on installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista and 7.

As an aside, if you're going to be doing SharePoint Development, you'll really be wanting to do it in a virtual machine running Windows Server 2008. You might need a bit more muscle in your host system (at least 6GB), but SharePoint can be easy to break when in development, so making snapshots of your fresh installation makes it easier to revert.

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    @James: why Windows Server 2008? What's it got (for development) that Windows 7 doesn't have?
    – John Saunders
    May 18, 2011 at 19:19
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    For one: it'll more closely match the environment that you're developing against; all the services that it needs (and your target environment might have) are right there. Additional:: If you're learning for no target environment in particular, and just want to get to know the dev lifecycle, object models, etc, Win7 might just be suitable enough.
    – James Love
    May 18, 2011 at 19:24
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    @James: but which of those services do I care about as a developer? Note that I'm not talking about deploying to Windows 7. I'll be doing automated builds, which will deploy to an instance on a server OS. I'll hopefully even get to do automated post-build tests. But I don't see why I need a server OS to do the development.
    – John Saunders
    May 18, 2011 at 19:26
  • IIS with ASP.NET comes as a standard server role in Server2k8 which is easy to set up there, the SMTP server is also there if you want to test Alerts or Workflow task emails, etc.
    – James Love
    May 18, 2011 at 19:30
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    Another good idea if you go virtual is having your host (dual boot if needed) as Windows Server 2008 (R2) and use hyper-V. Very easy to work with snapshots in case you break something.
    – Bart
    May 19, 2011 at 8:28
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This is the official guide from Microsoft:

I tried these instructions and they did not work. This could be due to user error though.

There is also a PowerShell script that claims to do it:

I have not tested this myself, but it is worth a shot.

After much frustration I was able to successfully install it on my Windows 7 machine by following these instructions:

They seemed a bit strange to me, but in the end it was the only method that worked. Good luck!

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I installed using the MSDN procedure noted above. Just make sure you have lots of RAM. I could never get it to complete installation with less than 4GB.

My current Win7 laptop has 8GB RAM, and I regularly see 4+ GB used by SP processes, SQL Server processes and IIS worker processes.

My machine has a 2-core 2-thread CPU (Core i5 520M) for a total of four logical cores or processing units. I suggest using 1 GB per logical core as a rule of thumb for estimating memory needs. You may need more depending on what you install, but you will probably never need less.

If you are memory constrained on your machine (< 4 GB), don't expect to do much more than run SP2010 on it.

SP2010 also significantly adds to reboot/logon time. These tools are useful for turning off the SharePoint 2010 services on your local workstation when not needed:

PowerShell scripts from MDSN:

Stop and Go with SharePoint 2010 on your workstation - Emmanuel Bergerat's SharePoint blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

GUI tool from Codeplex:

SharePoint 2010 Service Manager – Home

Good luck!

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There are several disadvantages to SharePoint development on your core Windows 7 desktop. In addition to the many services that SharePoint utilizes (which will be consuming resources on your desktop event when SharePoint is not running), you cannot deploy some of the core services applications to Windows 7, including the User Profile Service application, Search, and Office Web Apps.

Andrew Connell has an excellent summary of these items on his blog.

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The outcome was that I tried SharePoint Easy Setup, and it worked, eventually.

I find it has some issues and I needed to debug the script to fix them.

  • When there's a problem installing a prereq, it doesn't tell you what the problem was. For instance, I had a later version of Sync Framework installed, so that just failed.
  • I had a similar problem with WIF, so that failed too.

I eventually set a breakpoint in the script and removed all prereqs, and it then proceeded to install the server. This had a problem when the laptop went into Sleep mode, and later Hibernate mode. It seems there are timeouts on the Process.Start when it spawns off parts of the install. Because of the timeouts, the script failed in the middle of the PSCONFIGUI step, but left PSCONFIGUI running.

That actually completed, and I was able to use SharePoint 2010! I was able to create a site collection, and created two sites under that first one (Group Calendars - Interesting). I was able to save the site as a template, import that template into Visual Studio 2010 and then to deploy the modified site to a new, unconfigured site collection.

But it wasn't actually done! After rebooting for an unrelated reason, I found the setup script running again. It reinstalled the server and proceeded from there. It claims to have succeeded in the installation, but got quite a few error messages in the process.

Overall, I call it a win.

See SharePoint 2010 Post-Install if you want to see the details of the post-install phase, with the errors.

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