I am planning to use my laptop for SharePoint 2010 development and I have only 4 GB RAM which is not even upgradable. Just because of RAM constraint, my VS 2010 keeps crawling if I try to run it along with SharePoint 2010 on the same machine.
Hence, I’ve reformatted my machine and looking for alternate solutions until I get a new laptop. Currently, I have installed VS 2010 ONLY on my laptop and wanted to create an empty SharePoint project. Once done with my project, I want to deploy it on a different machine (which is a 4GB RAM machine as well, but contains only SharePoint 2010). I thought this will work and give me a bit of breather if everything is configured well. Unfortunately, when I tried creating a new SharePoint Empty Project in VS 2010, it says…
A SharePoint server is not installed on this computer. A SharePoint server must be installed to work with SharePoint projects.
Is there a way out?
I tried it the way @Shankar suggested, and got it working. I must tell that the experience is really much better and I am gonna recommend that as well. I blogged about it at http://www.dotnetscraps.com/dotnetscraps/post/SharePoint-2010-Set-up-your-development-environment-for-Windows-7-using-Boot-from-VHD-1-semi-automated-way-with-scripts.aspx