Introduction

In this article we will take a look at, basic considerations that you should put into your development environment for Share Point Server 2007.Moreover, we also discuss common developer resources that are , very common in the MOSS developer community, in fact some even become de facto for MOSS development. We will be referring to both Microsoft and non Microsoft products, links are provided, in case if you want to peruse particular item in detail.

Installing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) in Development Environment

The first step is to install MOSS 2007 on the machine, two things to know upfront. Firstly, MOSS 2007 comes in two Editions, namely Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition. Though you can upgrade to Enterprise Edition, even after the initial installation of Standard Edition, it helps to keep your preferences straight from the very beginning. If you will need Enterprise features (e.g. Business Data Catalog, Excel Calculation Services, Forms Server 2007) during development, then simply use the Enterprise Key during installation. If you want to see Microsoft Comparison Table, showing different versions you can take a look here.

Moving forward, other important decision is, during installation of MOSS 2007 should you opt for "Stand Alone" or "Complete" installation, actually there is another option "Web Front End" (but it's not important to explore it at this moment).Mostly for a pure development environment, either option will work, but "Complete" should get your preference as with "Complete", you can select the SQL server to host your databases, plus you can add other servers to the deployment, as if required. The "Stand Alone" , is much like "Complete" , but the main difference is that , it will not allow, you to chose SQL Server during installation , and it will automatically use SQL Server ( MSDE or Express Edition depends on SQL Server version) . Though for development this may be OK, but it helps to keep development, testing and production environment as similar as possible, and you will be happy to make that decision.

Lastly, the rule of thumb is if there is a MOSS Service Pack out there, you should have it. The exception to this is, if your production, or testing for that matter, will not be patched with service pack(s) before your development is finish, then you may want to wait until all the environments, are patched with same service pack(s).This is to ensure that there is consistency, among the environment , and nothing breaks.

Should we go Virtual with Development Environment?

Absolutely, honestly if you are part of large organization, most likely you have to maintain several development environments, all the time. For example, your Europe office may have MOSS 2007 installed with SQL Server 2005, on the other hand your Asian regional office, is using both SQL Server 2005 for older installation and SQL Server 2008 for new ones. Actually, it can become more complex , if you consider same scenario with different MOSS 2007 Service Packs.

Ideally you should keep virtual environment(s) with different configuration as required. In fact you have many options available, when you want to use virtualization (e.g VMware , Microsoft Hyper-V(comes with Windows Server 2008) , Microsoft Virtual Server , Microsoft VPC etc).

It's entirely up to you which product you chose. If you want to know more about, setting development environment using VPC's, you can get more details here

Visual Studio 2005 / 2008

Life of a developer cannot be imagined without Visual Studio. The latest version of Visual Studio is 2008, however many companies still using 2005, therefore we talk about both of them interms of SharePoint development.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions, Version 1.1

These are the essentially the Visual Studio project templates for developing Web Parts, Site Definitions, and List Definitions. They also contain an application ,that generates MOSS 2007 solution file for you. These extensions can be downloaded from here. User Guide for these extensions , needed to be downloaded separately from here. Lastly, do take note that, Microsoft does not provide technical support for these extensions.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2008 Extensions, Version 1.2

These are similar set of extensions as that of Visual Studio 2005, but for Visual Studio 2008.The biggest gotcha is that, they do not work with x64 bit version of operating systems. Well as a workaround, you can still take your binaries, from x86 to x64 and they suppose of work in x64 environment. Microsoft, as expected, recommends testing on your part, if you adopt this approach. You can download these extensions from here, you have to use the same User Guide that comes with Visual Studio 2005 extensions, here is the link again.

SharePoint Serve 2007 SDK: Software Development Kit

This is an absolute must item to have on the development environment. MOSS 2007 SDK, comes with a lot of samples, how to's , developer tools and ECM Starter Kit .You should download the latest one out there.At the time of this writing , the latest version is 1.4. You can download it from here

Non Microsoft Tools & Products

Though most of the time you will be doing fine , with Microsoft stack of products and technologies , but sooner or later, you will find out , that you may need certain functionality or feature, that is either not available out of box , or not exactly what you are looking for. In the following sections we will point out some of the common non Microsoft, MOSS 2007 developer related tools.

Most of us already know CodePlex , which a Microsoft Open Source community development center. It contains plethora of software's, for both MOSS 2007 and other Microsoft product and technologies. Better, you can start you own project, or become part of existing project.

SharePoint Visual Studio Development Related Tools

SPVisualDev

In case Visual Studio 2008 extensions, doesn't full fill your requirements, you may want to take a look at brand new project at CodePlex named SPVisualDev.This is another excellent example of community based development, by developers for developers. One of its great features is its good integration with another popular tool called WSSBuilder(see next section for details on that).

For VB.NET developers there is a bad news, as at the time of writing , SPVisualDev only supports C# project and item templates. But as with other projects at CodePlex, as time passes support of other languages are eventually made available.

STSDev : Simple Tools for SharePoint Development

STSDev is another nice tool to consider, if you are looking for alternatives to Visual Studio Extensions. One nice thing you will notice, is that you can download, and view screen casts explaining, in step by step fashion the installation and features of STSDev.

WSPBuilder

The creation of Solution files in MOSS 2007, can be quite painful and error prone. You need to made sure that you mention every single file and with proper path. And above all, you may not want to consume your valuable time in tasks, which are at best laborious in nature. Just download WSSPBuilder and whole solution creation will feel like a piece of cake. For download and related information, visit WSSPBuilder at CodePlex.

CAML Builder

CAML (Collaborative Application Markup Language) is SQL like query language used by MOSS 2007. Though similar to SQL ,at time when writing complex quires , it become time consuming to get the quires right , without consuming reasonable amount of time editing them. There are two excellent tools that every developer should have one is Yet Another CAML Query Tool and other is U2U CAML Query Builder. Both are light weight stand alone application, and super easy to use.

SharePoint Log Viewers

SharePoint logs provide very useful information to the developers, especially when things are breaking up and not working as they suppose to work. By default MOSS 2007 logs are store in text (.txt ) files , and hard to read and , above all there is no way to categorize them. You can use SharePoint ULS Viewer, which will let you view logs, in a more suitable standalone WPF application, and the best part is you can filter the logs by Process, Category and Severity.

In case you want to view logs, but from within the SharePoint Central Administration, you can use WSS/MOSS Log File Reader , this comes as a WSP (solution) which need to be added to the MOSS 2007 Server.

SharePoint Manager 2007

This is an excellent tool to have, it gives you complete inside of your SharePoint Farm , by allowing you to drill deep down into site(s) to view, and in some carefully analyzed cases change , those properties as required.

Apart from its usefulness from MOSS Farm exploration, it's an excellent tool for learning SharePoint Object Model. In fact, if you want to know working example of SharePoint OM , this is an ideal sample to have.

Remote Stsadm tool

In some scenarios, especially when you are dealing with multiple development machines, you may have to execute stsadm command on different machines. The easiest way is to remotely login and execute the commands , if you are looking for alternative solution , you can consider relatively new tool called Remote Stsadm tool. The only catch is that, in order for it to work , there must be a WCF service that should be running on Server, on which you want to execute the commands.

Conclusion

In this article we covered, some basic considerations related to setting up, MOSS 2007 development environment. We also discuss, number of development tools that allow you as a developer to develop applications for MOSS 2007, in quicker and better fashion. MOSS 2007 development is a huge topic, we will try to cover more details in future articles.