Visual Studio: Develop SharePoint Event Receivers without Admin rights or SharePoint Server

Question

Main issue: I need to develop an automated way to create new SharePoint pages when an item is added to a SharePoint list. For example, we have a list of projects, and when a new project is added to the list, we want a custom website for that project to automatically be created from a template.

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What I've tried: I have been researching this a lot, and it sounds like SharePoint Event Receivers can do what I need. So I got Visual Studio (both Visual Studio and SharePoint are 2010). However, I still cannot automate my child pages. I get an error message when I try to do anything SharePoint-related in Visual Studio: "A SharePoint server is not installed on this computer. A SharePoint server must be installed to work with SharePoint projects."

My organization is not big on new software, so getting more than Visual Studio is probably not possible. In addition, I will not be granted admin rights, so I don't know if I will even be able to use Visual Studio. (Also I'm pretty sure my SharePoint is not locally installed, but I don't know much about software set-up/configuration...I just want it to work so I can code!) I do have full rights to the SharePoint site, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Is there a way to solve this issue with only coding in SharePoint? Or is there a way to do it with just Visual Studio (non-admin) and SharePoint?

Answer 1

In order to develop solutions for SharePoint 2010 you need to have SharePoint 2010 installed on your dev machine. You can install SharePoint 2010 Foundation which is free.

Before you start development you need to decide which kind of solution you gonna create - sandboxed solution or farm solution.

Sandboxed solution has some limitations in functionality but you do not need admin access to the server to deploy it, only site collection administrator rights on site collection.

On the other hand farm solution allows you to use any available SharePoint object model APIs. But to deploy it you need to have admin access to the server (or at least IT guy with admin access who can run some ps scripts).

The decision mostly depends on what are you going to develop. If you have some requirements which do not fit for sandboxed solution then you have to go with farm solution.

From what you've described I think sandbox solution is enough.