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I am trying to program a timer job for sharepoint 2010. It's for my job at school and the sharepoint servers are located somewhere on campus where I don't have access to them.

I am new to visual studio, and when I try to create an empty sharepoint project, It tells me that I need to have sharepoint server installed on my machine in order to work with sharepoint.

I am just wanting to program a timer job for sharepoint in VS 2010, How do I do that without having sharepoint server on my machine?

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2 Answers 2

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You need to have SharePoint installed for you to develop for it. No getting around that. You could just write pure CAML and use a standard C# assembly project for the DLLs, and use something like WSPBuilder to compile it into a deployable WSP file, though you would be unable to test your development as you went along, and it would take you a horrendously long time to do so, too.

You can install SharePoint onto Windows 7 for development purposes (Here's how.) It's also highly (infact, imperatively) important that you have a test farm, separate from your development system AND the live system to perform integration testing of your solution before you deploy to live.

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Good to know, thanks a ton for the advice. That points me in the right direction –  novicePrgrmr Oct 31 '11 at 19:23
I'm not trying to duplicate here, I got pulled away in the middle of posting, and I didn't get the nifty alert that someone had answered. –  Jesus Shelby Oct 31 '11 at 20:02
Heh, no worries, you posted some more links there so it still counts :) –  James Love Oct 31 '11 at 20:38

You need to copy the server DLL's to your machine and register them. They are located here on the server:


Since you are working with the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration you need the base Microsoft.SharePoint.dll

Even if you don't have a development / test server you can spin one up in a VM for testing rather than turning your production server into your test server. You dont have to develop inside the VM's (althought this gives you the easy F5 deploy/debug via visual studio), you can just ship your solution into the VM, and do a test activation there.

Multiple Options for personal env:

Download already configured VHD from Microsoft

Install directly on Windows 7

Create a personal VM environment

My favorite, easiest, and quickest route is to use CloudShare

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