I know there are so many questions and articles on this topic and I have searched hours and hours on the Internet so far, but I still couldn’t find the right answer for my question. I was assigned the task to investigate the development environment for SharePoint web parts by my company. The money is not an issue but it must be the proper way to do it.
Here is my ideal plan: at developer desktop, install VS2005/2008 (it is already installed), VS2005/2008 Extension for SharePoint and WSPBuilder. It is also installed a Virtual Machine and the VM runs windows server 2003/2008. WSS3.0 and SQL Express 2005/2008 will be also installed on VM.
Developer’s desktop is a web parts development environment. Developers use VS to develop the SharePoint web parts and then run the WSPBuilder, it will deploy the web parts into the SharePoint testing environment on VM. So the VM is just a SharePoint testing environment. It looks like a good idea, however, it doesn’t work. Why? Because VS extension can't be installed on developer’s desktop as it doesn’t have WSS3.0 installed!
I definitely don’t want to install the VS on the VM, because our developer desktop has installed VS and we don’t need to have 2 VS licences for 1 developer. Any idea what is the best way to set up the development environment for SharePoint web parts?
Thank you in advance.