WSSv3 on Vista

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Yesterday Bamboo Solutions released a tool that allows you to install WSSv3 on Vista.  Developing on Windows Server has been a pain point for developers for quite some time & this workaround helps address that.

However,  I want to stress that this is not supported by Microsoft.  We have not tested WSS on Vista and thus make no commitment to supporting this.  However, I imagine that this will not bother many people and we will end up seeing this being a popular option.

We have known about this pain point for quite some time & I totally understand the pain everyone feels because of it.  I spent a lot of time in the field doing development on SharePoint and would have killed to not have to do that in a VPC / separate machine.  There are many reasons we hear about why people want to do this:

- They don't have a separate machine to install SharePoint on.
- Their organization does not allow Server installations on any workstations or VPCs.
- Their PC is not powerful enough to run a SharePoint virtual machine.

The list goes on ... but the 3 above are by far the most common.

To fully support another OM platform for our product is a big big deal.  It is a surprising amount of work to make sure everything works & we can certify that it does.  It is not simply a case of removing the OS block in our installer and letting the world have at it.  We must ensure that things work and that people wont loose data because of it.  Maybe some time in the future we will look at this, but for now we don't have any plans.

With the advent of Vista SP1 it was only a matter of time before someone did this.  Vista SP1 IIS is almost identical to IIS in Windows Server 2008.  IIS on Vista has some limitations such as a max request throughput count of 7 (or thereabouts).

Happy SharePoint development...

Thanks,

-Chris.

Update 6/9/08: I wanted to add a clarification to this post. You should always ensure that you are properly licensed for the software that you use. For Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and other Microsoft software you should review the end user license agreement that is required before using that software.