Connect and develop with sharepoint server 2013

Question

I recently setup a sharepoint server 2013 on our company and have found really good examples how you can override the suitbar with custom links. Now that I'm trying to implement those examples i get to that point where Visual Studio 2012 and Office development tools is installed. When i choose to start a new project I select New Project > Templates > Visual C# > Office/SharePoint > SharePoint Solutions > SharePoint 2013 Empty Project hit ok and i get an error that says Sharepoint not installed? Am I supposed to install VS 2012 and develop om my Sharepoint 2013 server directly?

Answer 1

A very common way to develop SharePoint applications is to run a virtual machine ( hyper-v under windows 8 for example ) on your development workstation.

You can also dual-boot into a vhd file .

You can also install Windows Server 2012 and use one of the many desktop conversion techniques to use it as your primary operating system on your workstation .

Another often seen technique is to have a virtual machine hosted in the cloud or a datacenter, running both SharePoint Server and Visual Studio. Then connect to that machine using Remote Desktop.

With some trickery, you could have the SharePoint 2010 installer install om a workstation OS. This no longer works on SharePoint 2013. The reason this support was removed is due to the inclusion of Boot from VHD and Hyper-v into Windows 8.

It is my experience that if you just want to build your application and not run or debug it, that just having the assemblies copied over from an actual SharePoint Server will allow you to do that . I haven't found an updated document for SharePoint 2013 yet.

Answer 2

Yes. You have to develop on the sharepoint server directly using Visual Studio as Sharepoint server GAC has the required server object models to work programatically with sharepoint server object model .

You can aslo develop on client machine using Client Object Model or WCF Data Services Framework .