Microsoft made some great improvements with SharePoint 2010 and one of significant one is that now you can run SharePoint 2010 on client Operating Systems like Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows Vista with SP2.
Now the question arises if one should use Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 for development? I would suggest Windows Server 2008 instead of Windows 7 for developer machine OS because of the following reasons:
-
Installation of SP 2010 on Windows 7 is a tedious task which involves installation of additional patches, hotfix’s and configurations. Also check the community content section for some issue people faced while setting up SP 2010 on Windows 7. Follow this link for Step by Step guidance on Installing SharePoint 2010 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx
-
In my opinion and learning’s from the past experience, it’s always better to develop application on same software configurations which will be used in the integration, test and production environments.
-
SharePoint 2010 requires Windows 7 Ultimate version. There is not much difference in performance and hardware resources utilization between Windows 7 and Windows 2008(if some unnecessary services are turned off).
-
In a recent interview Arpan Shah, Technical Director SharePoint, Microsoft, mentioned that there are some limitation when developing SP 2010 applications on Windows 7 and Vista. Here is an excerpt from his interview
- “It’s important to point out that there are limitations when developing on the Windows Client, so we recommend that developers use Windows Server for a full developer experience across all the SharePoint Server 2010 features.”
-
Windows 7 only supports standalone version of SharePoint i.e. you cannot add a Windows 7 machine to a SharePoint farm.
More information on http://reddevnews.com/articles/2010/06/02/sharepoint-qa-arpan-shah.aspx
He didn’t elaborate on the limitations so not sure what the limitations are.
So this is my 2 cents on this topic. I would be very interested to know what others have to say. Do share your opinion with us.
is it performance wise good to fetch data from more than two schemas?