Visual Studio: Development Environment for Sharepoint 2013 Enterprise vs. Foundation

Question

I am trying to determine if I can configure a development machine for Sharepoint 2013 Enterprise using Visual Studio Pro 2013 and Sharepoint Foundation 2013.

I do not wish to install VS on the production server and run it from there - that is just asking for trouble.

However the budget will not withstand another SP2013 Enterprise license.

I have searched this site and others, but have not found any instance that specifically addresses my question:

can I install SP2013 Foundation (which is free) on my development machine with VS2013 Pro, and use that to build solutions for deployment to my production SP2013 Enterprise server?

Answer 1

The short answer is yes you could do this, but it may not let you do what you need...

So my first addendum to 'yes,' is that the dev machine needs to be running Windows Server 2008 R2 or later and meet all the other hardware and software requirements.

My second is probably a bit more important -- if you develop on SP foundation instead of enterprise you'll be unable to develop and test many of the features that your organization (or your customer, whichever is appropriate) probably purchased the enterprise edition for in the first place.

Something that's also important to note, you wouldn't need to purchase another full enterprise license; you can get an MSDN subscription (platforms or premium for access to SharePoint) that will give you access to software to use specifically for development and testing purposes.