Visual Studio 2010 is, believe it or not, the very first version of Visual Studio to incorporate a complete set of SharePoint 2010 development tools—ones that we of the SharePoint development world have been longing for for many years. You might overhear our excitement by murmuring "Wow!" We can press F5 and then we can even debug our software! For those ASP.NET developers who might be new to SharePoint development in 2010, you might say "Yeah, so what?" Of course you can! To which we might reply "But you don't understand!!!". Anyway, I digress, this could be the subject of another whole chapter about what we used to have to deal with, which would add absolutely no value whatsoever to your task at hand today. Suffice to say, Visual Studio is your primary SharePoint customization platform that you will discover as we go through the book. For now, let us get this tool installed into your virtual environment.
Download Visual Studio 2010 from your MSDN subscription—get the Ultimate version if you have it, download the Professional version, or type Microsoft visual studio 2010 ultimate trial into your favorite search engine to download the 30-day trial from the Microsoft site.
Note
Note that there is an option on the start page of Visual Studio to register the software and extend this trial for a further 60 days.
Either way, you will be provided with an ISO image that you can attach to the virtual machine as a CD Drive. Run Autorun.EXE
.
Here is the recipe for installing Visual Studio 2010:
On the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Setup screen, click on Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
Under the Help Improve Setup section, de-select Yes, send information about my setup experiences to Microsoft Corporation.
Click the Next button when it is available.
Click I have read and accept the license terms and click Next.
Under Select features to install, select the Custom option and click Next.
Deselect options for Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual F#, Dofuscator, and SQL Server 2008 Express. Finally, click Install.
It's probably been long enough now, so have another coffee break and enjoy!
Click Finish when the installation completes and restart the server when prompted.
When rebooted, you can exit the wizard.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Visual Studio 2010.
You may now realize the point which we are at. I will put forward to you that by my experience, the most effective development platform for the SharePoint 2010 developer is a standalone virtual machine, where Visual Studio is installed within a full server-based installation of SharePoint 2010. Only time will tell whether you agree with me!