Webpart option in Visual Studio 2008

The official way to develop MOSS 2007 WebParts is to work on a Windows Server 2003 with at least WSS 3.0 installed or to use a similar VPC environment. In the VPC case this means you need to have at least 2 GB of memory available, in order to spend 1 – 1.5 GB for the Sharepoint Server VPC.

Setting up the Developer Workstation:

1. You need a Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista Machine with Visual Studio 2005 installed.

2. Install all Updates from Windows Update including Service Pack 1 for Team Suite or Service Pack 1 for Express Editions. If you run on Vista install the Service Pack 1 Update for Vista

3. You can optionally install WSS SDK an Office Server SDK also on your Workstation

4. Locate the Sharepoint Templates installed on the server environment and copy them to your Workstation User Templates. You have to navigate to:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp”
and copy the whole Sharepoint Directory to your user Templates Folder on your Workstation. The Path is normally:
“C:\Users\\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#”.

If you want to develop in VB.NET do the same for the Sharepoint Folder in:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\VisualBasic”

And copy it to:
“C:\Users\\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual Basic”

Do the same for the Sharepoint Folders in the ItemTemplates Directory. There is only one for CSharp. Navigate to:
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp”

And copy the Sharepoint Folder to:
“C:\Users\\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#”

5. Copy the complete Folder “Microsoft Sharepoint Developer Tools”, which can be found in “C:\Program Files” on the Server or VPC to your Workstation machine in the same location.

6. In order to register the Projects, Packages and Templates on you Workstation machine you have to add several registry keys to your Registry. Here is the whole stuff, just copy and paste it in a text file and save it with a *.reg extension:




Double click the *.reg File or import it using Regedit. In order to load the new package file, you maybe must start Visual Studio from the command line with the option /ResetSkipPkgs. Start a Command Window (on Vista this should run as an administrator) and navigate to:

“C:\Progarm Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE”

And start Visual Studio via the following command:

Devenv /ResetSkipPkgs

Now you should be able to create new Sharepoint Projects like WebParts. To doublecheck this, in Visual Studio 2005 navigate to the Menu File->New->Project the Dialog Box should look like this:



Now select the Web Part and click Ok. Visual Studio should create the appropriate Project Files. If you click on References in the Solution Explorer you will see that there is an unresolved reference to the “Microsoft.Sharepoint” Assembly. So you can not yet build the WebPart or other Sharepoint Projects on the Workstation. Therefore the next 2 steps are necessary.

7. The Sharepoint Assemblies (DLLs) are located in the following Folder on the Sharepoint Server Installation:

“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\ISAPI”

I copied the complete folder to the same location on my Workstation, but you can also only copy the assemblies, which start with “Microsoft.Sharepoint.*” to any folder on your Workstation.

8. In order that Visual Studio can automatically resolve the references you should add the assemblies to the Global Assembly Cache” (GAC). You can use the command line tool gacutil.exe or use the “Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration” which can be found through navigating to Control Panel, then select “Administrative Tools”.

9. Now you should be able to generate and build Sharepoint Server 2007 related projects on a remote Workstation.