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

Enjoy!

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Now, i’m not the usability “expert” that keeps bitching and whining about everything that was not built by Apple. Trust me, i’m NOT that guy. At the same time, i do believe in letting people know the good things and bad things about products that cost you money. After all, your money is just as valuable as that of the people that sold you the damn product.

And thus, I wanted to spread the word and let people know about my experience with Vista. I blogged about it twice already – 2 different issues of course. And i’m planning to continue doing the same as and when i come across annoying little (or big) bugs.

Here’s an interesting one for ya. I have been using Verizon Wireless Broadband Data Plan for my internet services and they gave me this USB720 data card. Great service. Excellent coverage. Love it. But here’s a funny question Vista popped up when i plugged in this data card into my notebook the other day (September 11th 2007 to be precise).

Hmm…..am i crazy or am i crazy?

UPDATE: Now that i think about it, i believe it is more a Verizon Access Manager issue than Vista’s. But oh well, as the end user i really shouldn’t care now, should i?

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Compare Google’s Scratch Pad gadget to Vista’s Notes. You can’t resize Notes. You can view only one note at a time. I don’t like that!

Compare Google’s Outlook Tasks plugin to its counterpart in Vista. Same issue. But here it gets worse – since you can’t resize the width of the gadget, the text actually gets cut off. I dissected the code and the CSS style for each list item (holding the task) is set to “overflow:hidden”.

You can’t even resize the whole sidebar horizontally. It just sits there, stuck!

But guess what? I downloaded and installed the latest version of Google Desktop that plays great with Vista. Fantastic! I got everything i wanted. Now my sidebar looks better than what i actually had on XP Professional.

For a developer, desktop real estate really matters. He tries to fit in as many windows as he can on his screen. And for some of us freaks out there, one monitor is not enough. We are like the moguls that just can’t be happy with all the space we have. So we get a second monitor (19″ or more…believe me when i say freaks, i mean it) and extend the desktop further (up, down, left or right).

So this sidebar issue is not really a big deal… i got more coming. Stay tuned.

P.S: No worries. I still am fascinated by Vista. And to be honest, haven’t found a show-stopper yet. There’s always a work around with MS products.

But if you really can’t afford to take risks or just the cost of it, here’s a cheaper way of getting the look and feel of Vista on XP.

Download the MVRTM.rar file and unzip the files with Winrar. In the “Visual Style” folder, you’ll find the MVRTM folder that holds an .msstyles file and a “Shell” folder. Copy the MVRTM folder into the C:\Windows\Resources\Themes directory. Double-click on the MVRTM.msstyles file and take it from there.

Before all that, you might want to download and install the uxtheme.dll patcher.

NO, IT’S NOT A 3rd PARTY SOFTWARE. Just a little hack of the uxtheme.dll file to customize your windows skins. That’s all. Google it and see for yourself.

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Anyways, so i download Virtual PC 2007 (download free from MS) and install it and i must say, it was pretty fast! And smooth. And then i installed Visual studio and VSS 2005 on it. Visual studio was painless and easy (surprised again).

But Visual Source Safe asked me to install XP Service pack 2 as a prerequisite. No problemo. Installed SP2 followed by VSS 2005 and voila! Here’s the message i get for successful installation.

Check out the pic below and tell me what’s wrong with the picture.

2 Free 7-11 beverage coupons to the correct answer.

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