There are many options for
SharePoint development with the changes to SharePoint and Office 2013.
With all these changes, understanding what you are trying to develop
and the components needed to be set up is critical. The two most common
development environments are the Office 365 solutions or the On
Premises solutions. The new app model makes it easier to create
development environments and has fewer dependencies than previous
versions of SharePoint. This change also brings back a restriction that
all classic development for SharePoint Solutions must be done on a
server OS. In addition to setting up a local development environment,
Microsoft has provided a full set of development tools for apps that
are hosted on the web for quick development.
Applications for SharePoint and Office 365 Development Environment
The steps to create an environment to
develop apps are simple in SharePoint 2013. Microsoft has recommended
that app developers sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site to help
with development and debugging. These sites are already configured with
the required app isolation and OAuth that would be required to set up
in a local SharePoint deployment. Also you get the full deployment
experience from Visual Studio, and you can deploy only to the Developer
Site. As discussed earlier all you need to do is install Visual Studio
on any support operating system for Visual Studio that includes Windows
7. After Visual Studio is installed, you install the Office Developer
Tools for Visual Studio, which includes the following necessary
developer components:
- Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 — Preview
- SharePoint Client Components (containing the client assemblies)
- Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) SDK
- Workflow Tools SDK and Workflow Client SDK
- Windows Identity Foundation SDK and Windows Identity Foundation Extensions
Napa Office 365 Development Tools
The Napa Office 365 Development Tools
are a set of tools provided with Office 365 that enable apps developers
to start quickly without installing any tools locally. To develop apps
you can use the full code editor with syntax highlighting that is
provided in the browser. To get this tool you must sign up for an
Office 365 account and create a developer site that enables you access
the tools. If at any time you want to continue to edit your solution in
Visual Studio, there is a button to open your project in Visual Studio.
This is a straightforward way to create your apps, as shown in Figure 1.
When you have an Office 365 account, you can access the editor directly from the URL https://www.napacloudapp.com/.
Local Development Environment
The local SharePoint development
environment maps to the traditional SharePoint environment that current
developers of SharePoint are accustomed to. This environment requires
that you install SharePoint 2013 locally on a Windows Server 2008
x64-bit server to begin development. The major change is that you
cannot perform the installation of SharePoint 2013 on a Windows 7
operating system and therefore cannot do classic SharePoint development
on these system configurations.
System Requirements
The system requirements for a machine
required for local development are not as large as a production
environment, but you should be aware of a couple key requirements when
setting up your development workstation. Because SharePoint 2013 has
only x64-bit installations, your development machine also needs to be
an x64-bit machine. The current recommendation is that the machine has
at least 6 GB of RAM to install and run SharePoint 2013. This is less
than the single server instance of the production hardware, and you
should optimize the development environment when working with less
memory.
Virtual or Physical?
This local development environment can
be installed either on virtual or physical hardware depending on what
systems are available and your budget. Installing SharePoint virtually
or physically on your machine is usually a tough decision. Many times,
the answer depends on the operating system you want to run on your
guest OS and also whether you want to trade off performance for
flexibility. Now step through each issue in a little more detail.
For the host OS, if you don’t mind using Windows
Server 2008 as your primary operating system, you will have many
options for installing SharePoint (whether that’s physical or virtual)
because Windows Server 2008 supports Hyper-V. When you know the
hardware and software, you can decide whether you want a physical or
virtual environment. The advantages of Hyper-V for a developer are that
you can have an isolated development environment that can be copied or
moved to another location.
NOTE To install a local development environment using Hyper-V, your hardware must support Hyper-V.
If you want to run on a desktop operating system
such as Windows 7, your choices are more limited because these desktop
operating systems don’t support Hyper-V. This means that if you want to
virtualize, you need to use another product such as VMWare or Virtual
Box because Virtual PC and Virtual Server don’t support x64-bit.
When you have the right virtualization technology
for your host OS, the question becomes whether to virtualize.
Virtualization provides a lot of nice features, such as portability,
ability to roll back changes, different environments on a single host
OS, and so forth. With all these positives to virtualization, there is
also a negative with the cost of performance. Of course, this
performance cost has decreased over the years with improvements to
software and hardware changes. The reason for the performance impact is
that you need to give the guest OS and SharePoint a few GBs of memory,
and you definitely need a fast hard drive, preferably 7200 RPM and
above. If you have the necessary hardware and you’re developing
solutions, the first choice should be virtualization. One last option
that developers have started to look at is the dual-boot system with
the Windows 7 dual-boot capabilities. This is sometimes not an option
for larger organizations due to adding machines to a domain ad hoc but
can be a quick way to evaluate a machine or use the full hardware.
NOTE Many
scripts and deployment guides will be released as the product releases.
For a full guide, check out the SharePoint Server 2013 Preview Virtual
Machine Setup Guide (v0.5) in the free members section at http://www.criticalpathtraining.com/.
SQL Server Version
SharePoint 2013 supports SQL
Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012. If you select the stand-alone
option when installing the product, SharePoint installs SQL Server 2008
RS Express with SP1. Although this option installs the product quickly,
you might run into issues with development if you try to access the
database through Visual Studio. A good alternative would be if you have
an MSDN subscription, you should use the SQL Server Developer Edition
for a full set of features that you can develop with.
