setting up a SharePoint 2010 development VM

I’ve blogged previously about my failed attempt to set up a SharePoint dev VM at home, on my laptop. I’ve given up on that for now.

But one of the SharePoint projects at work finally got far enough through the “spec” phase that I could justify asking our IT ops people to help me get a SharePoint dev VM set up at work. The regular help desk guys set up the base image (Windows Server 2008 R2), and the SharePoint admin guys then installed SharePoint 2010 on it, so I don’t have too much insight into that part of the setup.

Having been handed a working VM with SharePoint 2010 Server installed, it was then up to me to get Visual Studio up and running. That wasn’t much of a challenge. I installed VS 2012 Ultimate. The installer actually gives you the option to install the SharePoint tools, so I didn’t even have to do that separately.

I did have a bit of a problem, post-install, in that some Windows Update that came down automatically killed SharePoint. I had to re-run the SharePoint config wizard several times, make a couple of registry patches, restart some app pools in IIS manually, and so on and so forth. In the end, I’m not entirely sure which combination of random trickery was actually responsible for getting things running again, but whatever it was, I seem to have a working environment again.

But that pretty much killed the entire day, so I have to say that setting up a working SharePoint dev VM is not a trivial task, even if you’ve got experienced admin guys doing the bulk of the initial setup work.

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