My SharePoint Development Environment

I have researched on what would be the best way for me to setup a development environment for SharePoint - instead I ended up asking myself a question. Well, I guess the question is how much development I will be doing in SharePoint. Ohhhhhh Kkkkkk.... Hmmmm.

Well, let's just assume that I am a SharePoint developer. I do .NET programming for a living and I code a lot. But, SharePoint development isn't no longer just programming. Nowadays, a couple of clicks in SharePoint 2010 can deliver a web site that is dynamic enough that users can interact with each other using forms, discussion boards, etc.

I think there is a balance between a developer and admin work when working with SharePoint development. It's no longer just developer, developer, developer (sounds familiar?). SharePoint development will usually require a lot of configuration. Configurations are usually hard to backup.

So, here's my thought on SharePoint Development environment. I think virtualizing my SharePoint Development environment is a way to go.

From what I heard and read, virtualization has a lot of advantages however it takes resources such disk space, processor power and memory from my machine. Virtualization is also expensive for this kind of purpose - some may say it's overkill for a developer workstation. Nevertheless, here are the advantages of having a virtual SharePoint Dev Environment:

1. Easy to backup SharePoint server's configuration.
2. Can work multiple instances of SharePoint projects that has different stages of feature development
3. Quick and easy way to introduce a consistent development environment to the new developer.
4. I got a clean host machine - I won't be worried of any patch update from our HelpDesk team :).
5. One reason to get a faster machine ;)