I am setting up a SharePoint Development environment. Can I setup Sharepoint on a VM and Visual Studio on my production computer? <p>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.</p> <p>First, I am following a couple of helpful articles on how to do it as follows... </p> <p><a href="http://geekswithblogs.net/manesh/archive/2010/05/28/building-the-ultimate-sharepoint-2010-development-environment.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://geekswithblogs.net/manesh/archive/2010/05/28/building-the-ultimate-sharepoint-2010-development-environment.aspx</a> </p> <p>and </p> <p><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869%28office.14%29.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869%28office.14%29.aspx</a> </p> <p>Both of these article recommend setting up Sharepoint on a server environment or VM and THEN setup Visual Studio on that same environment. </p> <p>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 with Sharepoint? What do I lose if I just use my production install of Visual Studio (or will it just plain not work?). </p> <p>It just seems counter-productive to have two development environments (and I refuse to install Sharepoint on my production machine...at least right now.)</p> <p>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. </p> <p>Thanks in advance for your help.</p> <p>Seth</p>