We’re starting client engagements of Office 2007 SharePoint Services Beta 2 which will (hopefully) come to fruition around the time that MOSS RTM’s. Of course, that date has now become less certain but I’m confident that we are talking a delay of weeks not months.
When dealing with beta products it is imperative that you have full control on the development environment with an ability to roll back, take snapshots and quickly rebuild when things go awry. My environment of choice is to use Virtual Servers (using either the Microsoft Virtual Server or VMware Server products). VMware has the advantage of being able to take a push-button “snapshot” of both disk and memory state for rollback and 64-bit guest and host support. Virtual Server has “undo disks” which can be used to provide somewhat similar functionality however.
My virtual development environment for solutions consists of three virtual machines. A development workstation (I'm a big fan of doing all development in virtual PC especially when working with multiple clients it provides a needed level of isolation), a front-end server and a back-end server. The servers have their own virtual isolated private network and access is provided through remote desktop. To map from the private network back to a production network (e.g. for remote desktop or to publish the web server) I’ve found the PortTunnel application run on the host server provides a very robust and flexible solution.
Lesson Learned #1: When creating your guest machines, use Sysprep not other tools such as Sysinternal's Newsid. If you don’t, the setup will fail with a strange error “This access control list is not in canonical form and therefore cannot be modified” which you can find in the 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Beta Known Issues/ReadMe
The initial configuration of each machine is as follows. I expect this list to evolve over time!
Virtual Developer Workstation(s) (OFFICEDEV)
Windows XP SP2
Windows Support Tools
Windows Server Administration Tools
SQL 2005 Client Components
Visual Studio 2005
Visual Source Safe 2005
Visio 2003 for Enterprise Architects
Office 2003 Professional (Word, Excel, InfoPath)
Office 2007 Professional Beta 2 (Word, Excel, InfoPath)
SharePoint Designer 2007 Beta 2
Notepad++
While we are looking at deploying Office 2007 SharePoint Services you might notice I have Office 2003 installed. That’s because I don’t yet have a client who is looking to deploy the client side applications and so testing and development will need to be done against Office 2003.
Virtual Front End Server (MOSSFRONT)
Windows 2003 R2 Member Server
IIS 6 w/ASP.NET 2.0
Windows Workflow Foundation
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Complete Install
Virtual Back End Server (MOSSBACK)
I plan to use this environment as a template to get up and running with clients faster. We will host the development environment while the QA and production environments will be hosted on-site.
As the host server running these environments is sitting in a secure environment off of Peer 1’s network with a very large pipe as long as the client has a decent Internet connection this should be an effective solution to the many issues with developing on beta software.