SharePoint 2010 Setup - Hurry up and Wait Edition

By now, everyone and his brother are downloading and installing the SharePoint 2010 beta onto their Windows 7 and Vista boxes. Why not? I mean, for the longest time we were stuck with having to spin up a Windows 2003 or 2008 server so now accessibility is here and we can genuinely put it on our machines without hackish workarounds. Of course why you would install a server application on a desktop OS is beyond this blog post and for a discussion over beers at SharePint.

In any case there all kinds of guidance coming out on how to set things up. One of them is the MSDN article called Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server. This is a pretty good article but two gotchas I want to point out if anyone is following it and trying to slam SharePoint onto their desktop machine.

Step 8 of installing the prerequisites requires that you have certain Windows Features turned on. These are things like the web server role, ASP.NET, authentication, etc. If you use the UI and manually select the features to turn on, just ignore me for a few minutes. If you copy the command line code they provide to do it all in one fell swoop then read on. Do not copy the command then paste it directly into a command window. It'll fail with a cryptic message and the feature enablement will only be half baked. Instead copy it but paste it into a text editor like Notepad, remove the line breaks, then paste it into a command prompt. I will give Microsoft credit as they state "The following text contains line breaks. You must remove the line breaks to run this script from a command prompt." however its all very Python-esk like pulling the pin on a grenade *then* reading the next instruction that says "Do not hold the grenade for very long after pulling the pin".

The other trip is the SQL Server KB update (step 5 of installing SharePoint 2010). The instructions read as if you're going to click on a link, download a small file and run it, and move on quickly. The reality is a little more involved.

When you click on the SQL Server KB 970315 link, you're taken to a page to *request* the hotfix. There's no file there, just a link to request one (two in fact). So first enter your email address (twice) and the captcha and select both items from the list of hotfixes. In a few minutes you'll receive an email with a link to both items. BTW if you view this email in a web-based mail system (GMail, etc.) the link is incorrect and when you click on it you'll see a 404 error in your browser window. Click on the url in the addextress bar, move the cursor to the end of the address and remove the extra ")" character then press enter. The download should startup correctly (clicking on the link in a mail client like Outlook works fine).

Start the downloads and go grab a coffee, play a game or two of Modern Warfare 2 and maybe read a short novella. The two downloads are 400mb in size so it'll be a few minutes before you can extract them. Once you have files downloaded, click on them. You'll be asked for a location to extract them to and then be asked for a password. The password is in the email they sent you (you did keep it right?). Extract the two files to separate directories. Finally, launch the hotfixes by running the first one (381569 which is actually KB970315) then the second one (398850 which is KB976761). Once this is done, go back to the SharePoint installer that's beeen hanging out and waiting this whole time and launch the configuration wizard.

Clear as mud? Great. Enjoy!