Set Yourself Up for Sharepoint 2010 Development with Very Little Money

First things first! Let's get you set up for Sharepoint 2010 front end development and administration, with very little money, and almost no support from IT. We are assuming here that there is one of you, that you have administrator permissions on your computer, and that you are from a F/LOSS and or freelance* web developer position. Therefore, much of this software is free. Practically everything for Microsoft development is Expensive, because of the expectation that everyone who pays for Sharepoint has Enterprise Software Dollars**
* unsupported, underpaid, busy fighting with or for clients and now Sharepoint, too.
**A lot of dollars - which you will never personally see - dedicated to having a phone number you can call when things go wrong.***
*** Not quite enough dollars to fix the wrong thing entirely.

1. Sharepoint Designer 2010 64-bit
• Make sure you are using Office technologies on all either 32 or 64 bit. There is no mix'n'match, and if you install the wrong variant, you will be reinstalling everything so it matches.
2. Notepad++
• You will need a good text editor to do your work.
• You will not be doing this work on a mac.
• Are you trying to do this on a mac.
• Oh god. You're trying to do this on a mac. You're an idiot, you know that?
3. Boot Camp.
• Happily for you, I am also an idiot.
4. Windows 7
• Sharepoint is specifically designed to die on anything but a sealed Microsoft-only environment
• Which is why it will be one of those technologies that is a litmus for workplace quality in future
• Because proper houses that actually develop things use BaseCamp.
• Sharepoint is stored in-house and is therefore nominally more secure than Cloud Things.
• Clown Computing. Keep an eye out for Azure, even this tiny thread of happiness will soon be denied.
• I bet they named it that because it kind of sounds like "Assure."
• Which sounds like Ensure.
• Which I am certain they would prefer we "ate."
5. Chrome
• Their Developer tools are better at some things than others.
6. Fiddler Web Debugger
• Quite a lot of what you will need to do is encoded, and tough to find without it.
7. Cisco used to make a pretty okay VPN tunneller.
8. Reactivate Internet Explorer on your computer.
9. Grab Inkscape for vector graphics edits and Gimp for raster work.
10. Sweet-talk someone into giving you unlocked Visual Studio 2010 Unlocked Mega Developer Remix Edition With Passwords.
• Express has weird timeouts that mean you'll have to pay for it eventually anyway.
• pre-2010 flavours lack "make a thing for Sharepoint" project options, which means you will only be able to make a thing for sharepoint after puking levels of effort and research.
11. Inform your client base that you will not support any browser but Internet Explorer for Sharepoint purposes.
• Sharepoint relies on Active-X for multiple document upload because MS does not favour Java.
• See above Re: Sealed, Microsoft-only, high-profit-centre environment.
• Without multiple document upload, everything is madness for your clients.
12. If you are responsible for Security as well, encourage your client base to treat IE as a portal to Sharepoint and nothing else.
• Give them Firefox or Chrome.
• Try for Firefox 3 and Flash 10, which allows you to mess about with downloading YouTube videos out of cache.
13. Get your remote desktop client working, with permission to get to the server where Sharepoint 2010 lives.
14. Get all your permissions, account names, server names and etc. in place.

Got all that? Good. You're good to get started as a Sharepizzlybear.

This is going to be a character-building experience.