Getting Ready for SharePoint 2013 Development

With SharePoint 2010, you needed to have your development tools in the same environment as the SharePoint 2010 installation. With SharePoint 2013, one of the major improvements for a developer is that the SharePoint installation does not need to be in the same environment with the tools, i.e. Visual Studio 2012. Very good news, when the active SharePoint development environment is still the 2010 version, but you would need and want to be able to start getting aquainted with the 2013 already too.


Of course, you have the option to virtualize everything yourself, maintaining this all-in-one mentality in your development environment. If you are already in the Windows 8 era, you might be able to use Hyper-V as the virtualization platform, but VMWare works quite well for this purpose too. If you put up your own environment, the set of required software is pretty much the same as before, only the version numbers and/or SP-versions differ. You still need a 64x

• Windows Server
• SQL server instance (for stand-alone, express is ok)
• SharePoint 2013 (currently Preview) pre-requisites
• SharePoint 2013 Server or Foundation

Currently both Windows Server and SQL server are availble as 2012 versions, but the older ones go too, see detailed requirements in Technet Library. And remember to check the hardware requirements in the same article too.

The lighter option for a development environment is now, as stated, the option to have SharePoint elsewhere - e.g. a remote installation within your company, or you can utilize SharePoint Online for this! SharePoint Online is pre-configured to support testing and debugging; if you use a remote installation of your own, some additional configuration is needed:

• the installation must be configured to use OAuth
• SharePoint Client Components the need to be installed on the target installation

Then, of course, you need the development tools on your own computer. These include:

• Visual Studio 2012 (can be installed side by side with VS2010)
• SharePoint 2012 development tools for SharePoint 2013 (actually tools for all Office development)

You might need to install .net framework 4.5 before the installation of Visual Studio 2012, at least I needed to. VS2012 should be compatible with any Windows version since XP and Server 2003, but all of the components that come with it may not be. The Office development tool require Win 7 to be on SP1 level. For full compatibility and support list, see Visual Studio 2012 compatibility page.

Once your environment is all set up, just rock'n roll!