Sharepoint Development URL (Visual Studio)

Question

I'm trying to create a SharePoint app, but am having a hard time getting my Visual Studio to communicate properly so I can run my code.

I am using an Office 365 subscription and Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition.

If I look at the properties for my solution, in the SharePoint section active deployment configuration is set to "deploy app for SharePoint", server connection is "online", and site url is "http://myname.sharepoint.com/sites/MyDevSite" (with myname and MyDevSite replaced with the appropriate names for my site).

If I try to hit the debug button, I get a prompt saying "do you want to switch the project to offline mode?". If I hit no, I get a prompt saying "there were deployment errors. continue?". Saying yes asks about switching to offline mode again, and then saying no there again brings up a "communication with the SharePoint server is cancelled" error.

If right at the beginning I allow it to go into offline mode, I get the same prompt about deployment errors and then an error saying "connections to SharePoint server are currently disabled because the project is in offline mode. to connect to the SharePoint server, switch to online mode".

Things I have tried:

• using https instead of http on the server url
• using http://mysite.sharepoint.com (so dropping the /sites/MyDevSite portion of the url)
• building a deployment package and trying to add the zip file that visual studio created to my sharepoint dev site

I've come across guides for how to set up Visual Studio to work with SharePoint Online, however none of them give any insight into what I should be putting for my server url.

I can get functional projects through the Napa interface, however unfortunately I have been explicitly instructed that this isn't acceptable and I MUST do an MVC project in Visual Studio.

Until I at least have an environment where I can execute code, I can't do much with the various code examples that are out there. I suspect the problem is the url I'm putting into Visual Studio, however I suppose there could be a setting in Office 365's SharePoint configuration that I missed to enable remote debugging.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Are you using a SharePoint template? Which one? Do you see SharePoint templates when you create a new project?

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/1294152/no-sharepoint-development-in-vs2015-community

The link above talks about templates not being available in Community Edition. It seemed like you may have to install some component to get it working.

I would be surprised if SharePoint templates were included in a free version of VS. I am more familiar with older versions so I could easily be wrong, but you had to have professional version or higher in 2010/2012.