A.1. Installation Requirements

The use of VSeWSS requires Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Visual Studio 2005 to be installed on the target machine, since most of the assembly references that are going to be used for SharePoint development exist solely on a SharePoint enabled machine. Without WSSv3 and VS2005, the MSI package will not allow the installation to perform.

However, if at some point you want to place the Visual Studio Item and Project templates on another development machine regardless of whether or not WSSv3 is installed, it is feasible to do this after acquiring them from the development machine running SharePoint after successful installation of VSeWSS. This is helpful if you're accustomed to doing development on another machine besides those that are engaged in the preproduction deployment lifecycle in a SharePoint environment. The only caveats to this are that the assembly references that are automatically made when instantiating a new VSeWSS Project or Item template will have to be manually resolved and the embedded SharePoint Solution Generator will not be installed. The latter is a large loss, since it means forgoing several of the runtime debugging options and built-in provisioning features, whose influential aspects will be demonstrated shortly.