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Is it possible to develop for Sharepoint using Visual Studio 2010 pointing to the Sharepoint installed on a seperate server? When I try to add a sharepoint connection in VS2010 it gives my error that there is no sharepoint server installed on my machine. Do I really have to install it on my machine? Can't I just connect to a sharepoint server for developing application?

Cheers.

Zinx
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2 Answers2

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Unfortunately, you cannot develop against a remote SharePoint installation. You must have a running SharePoint installation on your development machine.

pmartin
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  • Thanks for a quick response. Can it be a express (free) version of sharepoint to start with? – Zinx Apr 05 '11 at 20:21
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    Absolutely! The newest free SharePoint version is called SharePoint Foundation 2010 (http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/product/Related-Technologies/Pages/SharePoint-Foundation.aspx) – pmartin Apr 05 '11 at 20:22
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There is a workaround for this. Export the 14 hive from SP2010 server machine and import it on your development machine and it would work.

This is similar to the "fix" for getting the host to create VS 2008 Sharepoint projects without MOSS installed. For that one, all you needed was the SharePoint=Installed key.

Hope this helps.

Deepu Nair
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  • However, the problem with restarting the remote webserver when deploying still exist, right? – Eric Herlitz Apr 06 '11 at 20:34
  • No. In this case, you develop the code in the development machine with VS 2008/2010 and develop the deployment package like a WSP. Then, the WSP is moved to the remote server and deployed into the farm. This does not require any kind of restart. – Deepu Nair Apr 07 '11 at 04:57