Sharepoint 2013 Farm Visual Studio cannot connect

Question

I have Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 and SharePoint Designer installed on my local machine. I have a SharePoint installed on a server farm that i have full read and write permissions on. My problem is when i try to create the project the wizard to connect to the SharePoint will not show up and it says i need it installed on my local machine. I have read many forums posts such as

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/5853a07e-e033-43ab-929b-f5766354fea9/cannot-connect-to-sharepoint-2013-farm-with-office-tools-for-visual-studio-2012?forum=sharepointdevelopment

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj220047(v=office.15).aspx

along with others these are just the ones still open in my browser. I would love some help or a proper tutorial because the ones i am finding are no help and im not seeing anything besides a error message saying i cannot create a project until i install foundation or server for sharepoint

Answer 1

This is a case where the error message means exactly what it says. You must install SharePoint on your development machine in order to use Visual Studio for local SharePoint development. You can develop on Windows Server 2008/2013 (most common solution I've seen), install SharePoint on your Windows 7/8 machine (which is painful to do but possible), or set up a remote environment for development after signing up for an Office 365 Developer Site.

Answer 2

After hours of searching I found a work around for anyone who is running into this problem... You need to make a web reference to the SharePoint site then you can access the XML and do it that way. Microsoft hides the option its under service reference then you click web reference add the URL and a easily called name add it and your good to go.