Setting up SharePoint 2010 development environment on my Windows 7 laptop

SharePoint 2010 is now well into the Beta 2 phase. As a consultant and developer for SharePoint solutions, it’s time for me to dive in! To do that well, I need to have a development environment to play around on top of reading blogs and PDC materials.

Given the choice, I would love to setup the a virtual box on my work laptop, but the hardware specs of 4GB and 2.0GHz seems to be at the border line of usable performance. Besides, I don’t want to reinstall my newly imaged Windows 7 workstation laptop to Windows 2008 R2 for Hyper-V. I’m not gonna buy VMWare either. I also tried Sun’s VirtualBox which support x64 guest OS, but it’s really really slow…

That leaves me no choice but to install it on the host machine itself, since SharePoint 2010 now support installation on Windows 7 and Vista, or, more or less. I says so because it’s not so straight forward as installing it on Windows Server 2008. However, it’s much more easier than doing the same for SharePoint 2007.

Being a late starter, plenty of resources already available on the Internet. Many people hit into some problems getting it to work on Windows 7. Some straight forward, some not. Here’s the steps I’ve taken to complete the installation until Site Collection creation is working:

1. Followed the steps in Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server. (Why can’t it be easier?)
2. As pointed out in the SharePoint Team Blog, applied the Hotfix KB976462.
3. Had a UserProfile Exception, due to TimoutException. This blog helped me out, which is to delete some cached ASP.NET files in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\d31735f8a1b34f3a8263707181c7e298\5902e8c4\679035c5\.
4. Some other errors that I also encountered during the configuration wizard process are:

a. Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: User cannot be found.

b. Unable to create a Service Connection Point in the current Active Directory domain. Verify that the SharePoint container exists in the current domain and that you have rights to write to it.

These errors were probably resolved by applying the patch in #2 or the steps in #3.

So now I got a working test bed to try out those exciting features that I’ve read for months!