This last Wednesday didn’t go as planned. I was hoping to attend both Rocky Lhotka’s talk at the Chicago Technology Executives Club and the CNUG VS2008 loadfest meeting. I didn’t end up going to either, for various reasons that aren’t important here.
However, I still have a chance to win a Zune if I blog about my favorite VS2008 feature. So here it is: Spell checking. I know, that sounds kind of lame, but it’s pretty irritating to me when I realize that my SharePoint application or web part works just fine, but I need to build a whole new deployment package because I’ve bungled the spelling of some word that I’m displaying to an end user.
I’m in the process of wrapping up a project, but when I have some free time between Christmas and New Years (assuming that I do, which may be a mistake…) I plan to build a VM from scratch with the following:
- Windows 2008 RC0 or latest
- SQL Server 2005 SP(latest)
- MOSS 2007 SP1
- Visual Studio 2008 trial
- SharePoint Designer 2007 SP1
- Whatever other dev tools I need for MOSS development …
- Powershell is always nice to have
Then see if I can build a MOSS something (perhaps an SPField, perhaps a password changer, etc) and package it up as a WSP and publish it to codeplex.
I also plan to catch up on my SharePoint blogging and blog about my experience building the above environment.
–Michael