I am trying to program a timer job for sharepoint 2010. It's for my job at school and the sharepoint servers are located somewhere on campus where I don't have access to them.
I am new to visual studio, and when I try to create an empty sharepoint project, It tells me that I need to have sharepoint server installed on my machine in order to work with sharepoint.
I am just wanting to program a timer job for sharepoint in VS 2010, How do I do that without having sharepoint server on my machine?
You need to have SharePoint installed for you to develop for it. No getting around that. You could just write pure CAML and use a standard C# assembly project for the DLLs, and use something like WSPBuilder to compile it into a deployable WSP file, though you would be unable to test your development as you went along, and it would take you a horrendously long time to do so, too.
You can install SharePoint onto Windows 7 for development purposes (Here's how.) It's also highly (infact, imperatively) important that you have a test farm, separate from your development system AND the live system to perform integration testing of your solution before you deploy to live.
You need to copy the server DLL's to your machine and register them. They are located here on the server:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI
Since you are working with the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration you need the base Microsoft.SharePoint.dll
Even if you don't have a development / test server you can spin one up in a VM for testing rather than turning your production server into your test server. You dont have to develop inside the VM's (althought this gives you the easy F5 deploy/debug via visual studio), you can just ship your solution into the VM, and do a test activation there.
Multiple Options for personal env:
Download already configured VHD from Microsoft
Create a personal VM environment
My favorite, easiest, and quickest route is to use CloudShare
