Let me start off by saying that I know you can't install SharePoint 2013 on a Windows 7 machine (confirmed here). However my situation is this:
I am in the process of upgrading a large SharePoint 2010 intranet solution to SharePoint 2013. The application is hosted in SharePoint Online / Office 365 so consists entirely of sandbox solutions. For the moment, we do not have the capacity to rewrite the sandbox solutions as 2013 apps.
My current development machine is running Windows 7 and SharePoint 2010 (which I still need for supporting / developing other applications) and I am after the quickest & easiest way to use it for building my SharePoint 2013 sandbox solutions too.
I realize that re-imaging or dual-booting my laptop with Windows Server 2012 and SharePoint 2013 would solve my problems, but it certainly doesn't seem like the path of least resistance here!
So, I figured that if I copied the SharePoint 2013 assemblies to my machine (as you would when setting up a 2013 build server) then I'd at least be able to build the 2013 solutions locally and deploy / run them on my free Office 365 developer site. Is this feasible? I followed these steps to get this going
After changing the references in all my Visual Studio projects to point to the SharePoint 2013 assembly (and all the other steps listed here), I'm still getting the following build errors in Visual Studio 2012:
Assembly 'Xxx, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=xxxxxxxx' uses 'Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c' which has a higher version than referenced assembly 'Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c'
I assume this is because I still have SharePoint 2010 installed on my system. Can anyone shed some light on what I need to do to get my SharePoint 2013 solutions to build on my 2010 development environment?