Essential SharePoint 2007, 2nd Edition

Preparing to Develop Rendered Web Parts

In the previous version of SharePoint, web parts were hard to develop. That's the main reason why so many people are grateful to Jan Teilens for SmartPart. With this release, Microsoft has made things somewhat easier, and you can now create, deploy, and debug SharePoint web parts from within Visual Studio. However, for everything to work correctly you must be running Windows 2003 SP1 on your development machine.

As mentioned earlier, most developers use Windows XP Professional, so doing web part development means you must do one of the following:

• Upgrade to Windows 2003.

• Use Remote Desktop to access a server running Windows 2003 and do your development there.

• Use Microsoft Virtual PC to run Windows 2003 within Windows XP on your desktop.

The main advantages and disadvantages of each approach are summarized in Table 11-2.

Table 11-2. Possible web part development approaches

Approach	Advantage	Disadvantage
Upgrade	Best performance for development	Changing your desktop OS is disruptive
Remote Desktop	Server can be shared with other developers/testers	Requires an additional physical server
Virtual PC	Contained on single desktop, you can create/change server configurations without affecting others	Reduced performance Usually requires a memory upgrade

Don't develop on a production server. Doing development resets Internet Information Explorer (IIS) periodically, which is disruptive for users.

Tip

You can create and compile web parts under Windows XP if you copy and ...