Anyways, enough of bitching. Every Sharepoint developer that i knew, installed VMWare on their machines that ran Windows 2003, SQL Server 2005 and VS 2005/2008 and used that as their development environment. Why? Because WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 runs only on server operating systems. Brilliant! Let me get this straight. We are supposed to build applications that would run on “portal” software that are hosted on servers, and so we are supposed to do our development on server operating systems? Of course! Makes perfect sense! Yay Microsoft!

I don’t know man…i just didn’t want to load yet another software on my box and do all the configuration. Luckily for me, Bamboo Solutions had figured out a way to get MOSS 2007 to run on Vista/XP operating systems. As always, i started off my learning process by opening up a brand new word document and taking screenshots of each and everything i did, right from scratch. That includes pictures of installation wizards, “This program has performed an illegal operation” errors (sugar coated for Vista), dashboards, Visual Studio IDE, etc.

The end result of all this pain is a document that has some blurry images but decent content on how to write a “Hello world” web part and successfully deploying it to a sharepoint portal, all starting from scratch. This tutorial would make more sense if you are a .Net developer and have been doing custom application development for a while. It is meant for someone that has no idea where to begin, in their attempt to learn Sharepoint. So if you feel some of the screenshots in the document insult your intelligence, just remember that not all people are as smart as you, wise guy.

Here’s the doc in PDF – How to get MOSS 2007 development environment setup in Vista.pdf

Enjoy!

Please note that all of these tools were not recommended by anyone when i started. Google brought them to me. We’ll be looking at Apex, Red-Gate and SQL Accessories. I was using all these tools to compare and sync up 2 databases that were approximately 80GB each and about 90% similar (both data and schema).

Apex SQL Diff Tool

Apex SQL Diff Tool was the biggest joke of all. Nothing but pure waste of my time i spent downloading and installing it. This one just bombed during the comparison. Not once but thrice. It just couldn’t handle the sheer amount of data. Just to give it one more chance before i trash it here, i tried opening the application right before i started writing this post and voila! This is what i get. See the image below.

Click image to zoom.

What a waste!

SQL Accessories – SQL Data Examiner

SQL Data Examiner started out pretty good but then refused to compare certain tables because they didn’t have primary keys. It asked me to set one myself from any one of the fields in the tables.

Why do some tables not have primary keys, you ask? I didn’t design it and i don’t think it would be appropriate for me to talk a lot about the data model due to contractual restrictions with the client.

Anyways, after running for about 10 minutes, this one threw an exception too. Although not as nasty as Apex. I must also mention that when i ran it again, it worked just fine. So i’m not going to complain too much about this one.

Red-Gate – SQL Data Examiner

SQL Data Compare wins hands down in this contest. The amazingly easy to use interface is just awesome and the tool did what i wanted it to do, the way i wanted it to do it and was crazy fast. I had a few questions that were answered by their customer support in a courteous and prompt fashion. I have used their other tools before like the SQL Prompt, SQL Compare (not the data compare – this one compares just the schema), SQL Refactor, etc. They even have .Net tools like ANTS Profiler, ANTS Load etc. Amazing tools that i think every MS developer should have. Increases productivity and makes you a better developer. I have already bought my personal licenses for these tools.