I am setting up a SharePoint Development environment. Can I setup Sharepoint on a VM and Visual Studio on my production computer?

I am going to be learning how to do SharePoint 2010 development and as such I am setting up my environment? I have a couple of questions about that.

First, I am following a couple of helpful articles on how to do it as follows...

http://geekswithblogs.net/manesh/archive/2010/05/28/building-the-ultimate-sharepoint-2010-development-environment.aspx

and

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869%28office.14%29.aspx

Both of these article recommend setting up Sharepoint on a server environment or VM and THEN setup Visual Studio on that same environment.

I was wondering if it will work to setup Sharepoint on a VM Guest and use my existing installation of Visual Studio (my VM host) to do the work. To do Sharepoint development do you HAVE to install Visual Studio on the VM Guest 开发者_运维知识库with Sharepoint? What do I lose if I just use my production install of Visual Studio (or will it just plain not work?).

It just seems counter-productive to have two development environments (and I refuse to install Sharepoint on my production machine...at least right now.)

Also, will SharePoint Foundation edition (rather than full server version) function just fine for learning and development or will I find that I am eventually going to hit barriers and limitations with it.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Seth

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In order for many of the SharePoint features Visual Studio 2010 to work, both must be installed on the same machine (or VM). Visual Studio can't deploy to another machine, and the debugger (F5 Debugging) won't work remotely. If you choose to not install VS on the VM, then you will have to package and deploy the solutions yourself, as well as debug them yourself, either through the remote debugger, or trace logs on the machine. Its worth installing VS on your VM.

The SharePoint Foundation will work fine for learning, unless you are trying to learn about some of the features specific to SharePoint Server. Here is a good chart showing the differences.

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You need to have SharePoint installed on your development machine so that you can write code utilizing the SharePoint assemblies.

As for just using SharePoint Foundation, I would recommend that you identify what sort of functionality you want to work with and let that determine if you can get away with just using SharePoint Foundation or not. Personally, I would use the full version so that you can learn about the the functionality it offers as well. Otherwise, you won't really be learning everything that SharePoint can provide for you.