Question

Possible or not?

I know Sharepoint 2010 Server won’t even run on a client side of Vista/Windows 7 64-bit, forget about Windows XP 32-bit.

But if I can install and use Visual Studio 2010 on Windows XP just fine, shouldn’t Sharepoint development tools also work on Windows XP 32-bit?

The thing is I have a very old laptop (from 2005) that doesn’t even support 64-bit architecture so I am stuck with WinXP 32bit.

If there is any way at all of (Remote?) Sharepoint development on Windows XP 32-bit with VS2010 please let me know.

Answer 1

Most of what the developer tools offer you make two assumptions:

• You are running on a 64-bit architecture
• SharePoint is installed side-by-side with Visual Studio

Running on a 32-bit XP machine breaks these assumptions. Many of the built-in Visual Studio productivity aids, such as the deploy and retract commands, will fail. I couldn’t even create a project using the SharePoint 2010 project template under similar conditions.

You might make some headway by using regular class library or web application projects, copying SharePoint .dll’s from a server’s GAC (for use as references) and by manually creating your .ddl and .wsp files using MakeCab (as I did with 2007, with a little help from PowerShell); however, it sounds excruciating compared to running on Vista SP2 X64 or Windows 7 X64 with SharePoint installed.