How to make a virtual machine for development for Windows SharePoint Services v3?

At the request of a friend rengo publish this material about Windows SharePoint Services. Thanks, flowers and candy - to the author :)

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If you have Windows XP and do not want to reinstall on a Windows Server, then this instruction will help you.

System preparation

The first thing to start with is to install Windows Server 2003/2008 in a virtual machine. There are two typical options:

1. Use Microsoft's approach, honest, free, but traffic-intensive.
2. Use an approach dishonest, pirated, but trafic

Total: in an honest version, it turns out ~ 4.1 Gb, in a dishonest one - ~ 1Gb with approximately equal results (I did not notice the difference in the speed of Virtual Server and VMware). It is necessary to make a reservation that I personally had to download a total of 104 Mb in due time, because both VMware and the server I already had.
Further, I recommend to share on a virtual server a C drive completely for reading and writing, on the host machine, make a separate ball for target downloads (eg d:\Downloads\SharePoint ) and another one for SharePoint-related projects (eg c:\Prj\VisualStudio\SharePoint ), and connect them to the server as network drives, then it will be clear why.

Preparing Visual Studio

Microsoft has released extensions for Visual Studio, which include project templates, Item templates and other goodies, but, unfortunately, all this economy is put only on Windows Server 2003, happy users of Windows XP and Windows Vista fly by. And, IMHO, it is even good for neo-witts, because it allows you to immediately understand what is happening in the project for SharePoint.
The only real inconvenience is the lack of Sharpoyntovsky web controls in the toolbox, with which we will now successfully deal with the following steps:

1. You need to find the following files on the server and copy them into one tempo folder. It is necessary to search from the host machine - on the server, on the zashareny disk C.
2. Find a search on the system disk on your host machine, the file gacutil.exe, copy the folder to the libraries.
3. Run the command line in the folder where the files were copied, after making sure that there are no longer any dll files other than these.
4. On the command line, run the command “ for %l in (*.dll) do gacutil -i %l ”, which obviously puts all the libraries in the current folder in the GAC. I recommend to run the command 2 times, so that exactly everything got where it should be.
5. In Visual Studio, right-click on the toolbox, Choose Items -> Browse -> select Microsoft.SharePoint.dll. I do not advise leaving all the controls at once, for everything is not needed, but it will be much more to add, I never waited until the end. In order to avoid such annoying inconvenience, it is necessary immediately after the new controls are added to the list and remain selected, remove any checkbox in the selection, all jackdaws are removed at once. After that, you need to remove the selection by clicking on another control in the list, and only then select the necessary items with a tick.

At this stage, we are almost completely ready to work on any project. The final touch will be the installation of Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 - a convenient (and, afaik, the only) tool for easily creating themes for site pages (aka site pages. Not to be confused with application pages that are created in Visual Studio). You can download it you know where.
Whereupon, our first meeting has come to an end. Good luck in the development;)

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In the following releases:
- SharePoint from the user's point of view: who needs it?
- SharePoint for dummies: what to read, how to learn?
- SharePoint for dummies: write the first feature.