This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series SharePoint 2010
Development Series by Matthew Hughs
Well well well, look what's happened, I have spent quite some
time threatening to get into SharePoint Development and a few weeks
ago I decided I would make some effort to get things going and with
that in mind, of course, I wanted to share my thoughts and my
journey.
I welcome posts from any devs expanding on some of the topics I
might bring up or even correcting things I have done wrong, as
after all, this is how I will learn and it will help anyone reading
these posts.
With that said, let's start the series by taking a quick look at
what you might need before getting started.
Visual Studio 2010 
One of the first things you will need to start developing
SharePoint solutions is Microsoft's IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of choice,
Microsoft Visual Studio and this comes in various flavours from Professional to Test Professional and whilst
some people still swear by notepad or notepad++,
Visual Studio Premium is the version I will use in my examples.
You may also want to consider having SharePoint Designer 2010
installed as well as InfoPath and even Visio to help with some
other tasks although I doubt these are essential and certainly not
for this series.
SharePoint SDK 
One of the things that is a great help to have installed is the
SharePoint SDK (Software Development Kit).
The SharePoint SDK provides you with a wealth of information
that is searchable without having to go Google it.
So that's the development side of things but of course we need
some kind of environment to work with.
Virtual Machine
If you are not sure what a virtual machine is then go and check
out VMWare (specifically VMWare Player because it's free or
Workstation).
However, VMWare is the software that will enable you to create
your own virtual machines but if you don't want to go to the hassle
of setting up SharePoint and everything else you need then you can
always try the Microsoft Information Worker Demo VM which not
only gives you a pre populated SharePoint environment but also all
the software that i previously mentioned and lots lots more just
bare in mind that this is a Hyper-V image (although it could be
converted shhhhh!). This is a 180 day evaluation machine and
correct me if I am wrong but that gives you 6 months to get to
grips with this stuff.
So we have a Virtual Machine and the required software, now
what?
In the next part of this series we will create our first Visual
Studio Project and by the end of that post you will have created
your first SharePoint Web Part? Excited? You should be!
This article by Matthew Hughes was orginally posted on SP365
Why not keep up to date with the latest SharePoint content
by joining our community or
by following us on twitter or
Facebook!