Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea!

Being a SharePoint developer, I've just accepted my life that I'll essentially live within a virtual machine for all my development and presentations. Why? SharePoint requires IIS 6 because of the dependency of Application Pools. But, now that Vista has IIS 7 (and .NET 3.0), why can't it run on the desktop?

Sure, I've thought about setting up my laptop with a dual boot, one in Vista, one in Windows 2003 Server with MOSS installed. No, I've never come close to doing it. Why? Because virtual machines run fine for me (most of the time) and I really like the undo disks (so you can REALLY try to break things... you know the SharePoint equivalent of "what does that button do?"... otherwise known as "makes more sense for the '12' folder to be '70' so I'll just rename it").

I'm embarrassed to say what Spence muses about in his post is something I've never considered. Why embarrassed? Well, I'm a MCMS 2002 guy, and we had a developer edition whose license allowed us to install it on Windows XP Pro. Duh... CMS folk should have been the first to consider this! :P

One of his points hit the nail on the head: SharePoint (WSS, ~NOT~ MOSS) as an application platform!
I say this every time I give a talk or teach a class. I think I heard Todd say it first, but I consider WSS to be "ASP.NET Application Extensions." There are just SO many things we, as WSS developers, get out-of-the-box that some gearhead things he can write a better implementation. Well, you have it slick, but I'll stick with something that's supported by a company with a bit more financial interest in their platform to support & continue to innovate on it. The biggest problem I have with customers when talking to them about SharePoint is sharing all the goodness (you really need a few days) in the product stack. But for those who know everything within, man, this puppy just sells itself.

Don't get me wrong, I've got my share of complaints, wishes, and bugs I think I've ID'd. But on the whole, it's a fantastic product (and for those of you who think everyone should ship bug-free software, you should really ready up on Eric Sink's book, Eric Sink on the Business of Software (Expert's Voice)).

I like this idea... what do you think? Do you like the idea of having a version of MOSS that we could install on our client OS (namely Vista)?

Disclaimer: just as Spence said it, I'll say it too. No, I'm not leading on about a new WSS/MOSS SKU that's pending release, nor am I suggesting you should run MOSS on Vista... that's a licensing violation and I'm not going near that. :)

» harbar.net: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition

Technorati tags: shareoint, wss, moss, vista, iis

posted on Monday, February 26, 2007 10:42 PM

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re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 2/27/2007 4:25 AM Andy

The only situation I can see that being useful is for salesmen, with a fairly vanilla install direct to the OS. This is mainly for outright speed, which is important when demoing to customers. Even then, VMs have advantages in recoverability

Otherwise, I'll stick VMs for reasons of 1) easy undo, and 2) easy management and archiving of multiple customer systems, and 3) more accurate replication of customer system. I mean, if the customer is using Win2k3 server, shouldn't I be developing on it?

Sure... 2/27/2007 9:18 AM J Ross

Installing SharePoint on the client OS (or at least having the option) would be a good thing. I do rather enjoy the flexibility that VM's provide though. If (When) I really hose something up reloading a clean image is very painless. In addition, the memory requirements for MOSS are too large for me to install it in a practical fashion on my laptop anyway, so we've got MOSS running in a VM on a server that I remote into. This way, I see the "spinny ball" for a much shorter time.

re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 2/27/2007 10:01 AM ggreen

no doubt! we are on a project now with lots of custom code going on - we are having to "timeshare" the dev box between 4 people!

# re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 2/27/2007 12:26 PM AC [MVP MCMS]

ggreen-
Ugh... why not use the isolated development model & have everyone develop on their own virtual machines, then have a central build server for everyone to test?

re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 2/27/2007 3:05 PM Mark

The fact that SharePoint development must take place on a MOSS server defies belief. Even SPS2001 let you develop locally on XP. Admittedly that was about the only good thing about SPS2001...

Virtualization is pretty cool I'll admit but performance is never going to be exactly snappy for development.

re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 2/27/2007 11:21 PM MishoD

Another reason I personally like the VM better is that you can "train" it with little improvements, similar to many of your tips and tricks. This usually takes time and having all this knowledge accumulated in one VM is indispensable.

# re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 2/27/2007 11:42 PM AC [MVP MCMS]

Mark-
Ah, I think you're going a bit too far. Defies belief? The product leverages IIS application pools, which have only been available since IIS 6.0 which was only available on Windows 2003 Server.

re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 2/28/2007 8:15 AM Frank

ggreen,AC-
excactly what we are doing right now, we are a 4 developer team with a farm enviroment (VMs to) and 4 independant VMs for the developers. The only drawback is some offline incapabilities if the virtual domain is not available.
But since I got a Vista machine for anbout 3 weeks now performance sucks, vista consumes about 50% of 2 G memory for nothing.

# re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 2/28/2007 8:23 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Frank-
Really? Ever since I moved to Vista & ran my VM's using Virtual PC 2007, they've been running much faster.

# Re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 2/28/2007 9:19 AM Jake Dan Attis

Well, not to pour more coals into the fire, but I have heard speculation that there may in fact be a version of WSS in the works designed specifically to run on a client OS (add disclaimer her about this only being a rumor). That said, I am not to fond of the idea, and will always do my development in a VPC using a server OS. The thought of doing development work directly on my host makes me cringe. Virtualization, in my opinion, is where it's at.

re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 3/1/2007 11:39 AM Mark

AC - I think I'm happy with "defies belief" but I accept that I may be overreacting.

Requiring a server build for development seems a little over the top. I can't think of any other competing product that requires this (Documentum, Alfresco, etc). Whatever happened to developing locally then deploying to a dedicated app server?

Cheers

Mark

# re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 3/1/2007 11:51 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Mark-
The only reason SharePoint is on Windows 2003 is because of the application pool requirement. I'd suspect that if Vista wasn't so late, we'd see a developer edition that would run on Vista, so you could do true development locally, then deploy to an app server.

# re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 3/2/2007 10:34 AM spence

also bear in mind that sharepoint requires at least two Virtual Web Sites and IIS5.1 only supports one. Indeed whilst it's possible to have more than one (via an unsupported hack) only one can be running at the same time. Therefore even if SharePoint worked without worker process isolation you still couldn't have it on XP.

# re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 3/2/2007 10:47 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Excellent point Spence!

re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 3/12/2007 1:08 PM Mark Wilson

I don't believe the single web site problem is an issue with Vista now. AFAIK you can have multiple sites in IIS7 under Vista.

I tried using Vista and developing in a VM but Vista uses so much memory that giving the VM 1Gb on my 2GB laptop led to the host paging out lots so that the hard disk would soon be hammered so much it impeded development. Even ReadyBoost didn't really help much.

Now I have a fast machine, a 2Gb D820 from Dell with a nice dual core processor in but it still wasn't good enough for serious MOSS dev. I have since moved back to having Windows Server 2003 on my laptop and developing locally on the machine itself.
3Gb would probably help but going above 2Gb RAM is still very expensive these days.

# re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 3/19/2007 11:25 PM Spence

Mark, Yes IIS7 hs no restrictions on the number of Virtual Web Sites hosted. ReadyBoost is of no use in VM scenarios (other than load time of VPC itself) as it is simply a cache. It will not improve performance of the VMs themselves.

re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 5/21/2008 10:19 PM Jonas

Now you can install WSS 3.0 SP1 on Vista

http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/05/21/how-to-install-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-sp1-on-vista-x64-x86.aspx

/Jonas

# re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 5/22/2008 8:54 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Jonas-
I'd be REAL cautious here. First, I believe it's a big licensing voilation. Second, if you have anything acting wierd, you'll simply have to test it on a server based install before you can be sure you're really having an issue.

re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 5/22/2008 1:18 PM Jonas

Andrew,

I agree that you MUST test everything on a Win2003 server, since we don't know exactly how it's behaving differently on Vista. But I doubt that it's much difference, experience and feedback will tell. This is so you can develop (test out new things) on your workstation and then deploy to the test environment which is a server.

I also think MS "has" to release a Developer Edition at some point, this might speed things up ;)

About the licensing violation, I don't know. I read the license agreement as saying you can use one copy of WSS per copy of Win2003, so of course you need a copy of Win2003.
Nobody will use WSS 3.0 on Vista for "production".

/Jonas

# re: Office SharePoint Server Developer Edition... now this is a good idea! 5/23/2008 7:59 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2008/05/23/wssv3-on-vista.aspx

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