Author: Tobias Zimmergren
URL: http://www.zimmergren.net

Introduction

A lot of people have been asking me what my current development platform looks like in terms of virtual machines, what OS I’m developing on, what tools I use etc.

With this post I will try to summarize what my current virtual development environment looks like!

Note: For different enterprise-projects, this will look a lot different of course. This post only covers my main on-a-daily-basis machines that I use to develop and customize SharePoint, and not the complete harem of my setup!

A few different environments

I’ve got a couple of different environments running for my SharePoint playground.

• Main development environment
  • VPC: MOSS+SQL, 3700 MB RAM
  • VPC: DC, 1024 MB RAM
• Main testing/deploy environment
  • VPC: MOSS+SQL, 2048 MB RAM
  • VPC: DC, 1024 MB RAM
• Legacy development environment
  • VPC: MOSS+SQL, 3700 MB RAM
  • VPC: DC, 1024 MB RAM
• Legacy testing/deploy environment
  • VPC: MOSS+SQL, 2048 MB RAM
  • VPC: DC, 1024 MB RAM

I’ve got a couple machines running in Hyper-V as well, but they’re out of the scope for my "daily-basis" rigs. I may cover them in another post.

Main Development Environment

In my main development environment I am currently running the following setup:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 + rollups
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007
• Microsoft SharePoint Designer (this product is now FREE by the way)
• WSS SDK
• MOSS SDK
• Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

That is the baseline for my setup, and on top of that I am running a bunch of third-party tools to make the life of a developer and administrator a heck more efficient:

• WSPBuilder, awesome dev-tool by Carsten Keutmann
• WarmUpScript, I still use this from time to time!
• Application Pool Manager, great tool by Spence Harbar
• SharePoint Manager 2007, another awesome tool by Carsten Keutmann
• CAML Query Builder, the foremost important tool next to the WSPBuilder in my rig!
• BDC MetaMan, great BDC Definition Editor by LightningTools
• .NET Reflector

The tools mentioned above are the tools I ALWAYS have installed on ALL my dev machines, then of course on a case-to-case scenario there’s a bunch of other tools I may need to install.

Scroll down to the end of this article to see links to other great tools, of which some I am using myself!

Legacy development environment

The tools I use are the same, but the main setup looks like this:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 + rollups
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (+VS 2008 if needed)
• Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007
• Microsoft SharePoint Designer
• WSS SDK
• MOSS SDK
• Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Legacy testing/deploy environments

When I need to test my products, solutions and fancy-pancy code – I usually switch over to an independent  machine which is installed from scratch in order to make sure that all the solutions works without any underlying or unknown dependencies.

This environment is basically a replica of the development rig.

No development tools installed here!

Other tools for the toolbox

Bil Simser has written up a good list of "Favorite CodePlex Projects" which I find very interesting.

Vincent Rothwell aka. The Kid as an awesome summary of his dev toolbox that might be worth checking out

There’s a bunch of great tools on CodePlex, so if you havn’t checked it out already – DO SO NOW