One of the most common questions I get asked from developers is “What is the best way to set up a SharePoint Dev Environment. And they normally get a much longer answer than they’d like – there are a lot of things that can affect the answer – how many people are working together, what are their roles, how locked down are your developer boxes, are you using TFS… the list goes on.
Well, things are changing for SharePoint 2010. And it’s a change for the better – I’ll cover a lot of the new items as we go along, but I would like to point out that the MSDN documentation now calls out the “standard” process for setting up a dev environment. You can find it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx and use it as a basis for putting together your own customized development environment.
If you want a little more discussion on the matter, you can see what’s going on in the SharePoint Dev Wiki at http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com/display/sp2010/Building+a+SharePoint+2010+Development+machine
