It isn't often that I do development anymore, but from time to time, I brush the dust from Visual Studio and jump back into the trenches. This time I found myself needing to create some functionality in the wonderful world of MOSS.
I have built out a dev machine many times in the past and although it is time consuming I would have never foreseen all the problems I experienced this time around.
My current machine is a Compaq laptop, model 6720s with 4Gb of RAM and running Windows 7 x86. One thing about this laptop is that it doesn't come equipped with hardware virtualization support. This means that I couldn't run the latest version of Microsoft Virtual PC. I proceeded to install Virtual PC 2007, loaded the .vhd with Windows Server 2003 R2 and fired it up. Problem 1: Computer became unresponsive every time I clicked into the VM. So I uninstalled that and installed VMWare Desktop and tried to convert the .vhd file that I had just created and the conversion failed, Problem 2.
Plan C... dual boot system. Good article here on the basics, thanks Brock.
The next problem that I encountered was that Windows 7 only allows you to boot into a VHD that is either Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, problem 3. So the effort I had put forth in creating the windows server 2003 was time well wasted, sigh... I started creating a new Windows Server 2008 R2 system. After the system installed and I was capable of performing the dual boot, I thought I was home free from a problem ridden day.. wrong!
Problem 4, Windows Server 2008 R2 doesn't allow you to install MOSS or WSS 3.0 without slipstreaming SP2. Rather then receiving a dialogue that tells you this, you are met with a prompt that states, "Problem blocked due to compatibility issues". Awesome!
At this point, I was quite frustrated and hoping that the day would end on a good note. Nope. Wrong again!!! Day ends, nothing accomplished...
Day 2, Problem 5, Windows Server 2008 R2 only supports SQL Server 2005 w/SP3. So towards the end of the install I get an error from the SharePoint install about SQL Server being a blocked application due to compatibility issues. So I skipped that part of the process, created a slip streamed SQL Server 2008 install, it has to have SP1, and ran that. Then relaunched the SharePoint product and technologies wizard and finally after a solid 1.5 days was finally up and running.
Lesson learned!