More and more often the last few weeks I have had developers ask me about setting up a Development Environment for SharePoint Server 2007. There is quite a huge amount of information about this topic on Google, however I find that a lot of it is not up to date. I have had to develop for SharePoint in the last few weeks and I wanted to be able to develop in a 64Bit environment, and also needed a virtual machine that I could use without needing my Network team to give me admin rights and have to deal with a new Active Directory setup. In the process I was able to put together a very stable and useful development environment running on either Windows Server 2008 32Bit or 64Bit.

To save some time in having to answer this question a few thousand times, here is the 2 part series on building a Windows Server 2008 SharePoint Development environment:

Part 1: Requirements

Part 2: Installation

These articles do assume that you have a basic understanding of how to install Windows Server and also understand the concept of virtualization, although the installation will work in a real environment as well. I am also using the exact same environment on two different machines, my Windows machine at work and my MacBook at home, and therefore mention any differences between the two installation if there are any.