Test deployment for Sharepoint by multiple developers on a single server

Question

We are starting with Sharepoint development with a team of three and are currently setting up our development environments. We would like to avoid installing a Server 2008 for each developer, thus a single terminal server has been setup, using Remote Windows to start a VS2008 instance on each developer's machine. Now we would like to separate developers' testing environments (i.e. a different site colletion per developer), but have realized that the assemblies would need to be installed into GAC to show properly on the site. But since there is AFAIK only one GAC, developers wouldn't be able to test their stuff independently.

Is there any way we could create separate testing environments without installing a bunch of 2008 Servers?

Answer 1

The contributors are right that there are lots of stumbling blocks to multi-developer single server environments.

Number one developers will be trying to attach to the same Web Application process w2ps.exe so creating separate Web Applications on different ports is a must unless you are prepared to share time debugging. How to setup a development environment for sharepoint 2013

The second problem is when you try to collaborate and use shared components/features. Having a desire to work separately is debatable, I believe that the team developers should be collaborating and sharing so combing work is desirable to ensure seamless integration into a single final solution and that no work is duplicated. The multi-developer single server environment works perfectly until you try to collaborate 'One common mistake is to have one “development server” used by all team developers. Unless team members are working on totally unrelated components and never need to do common things such as restart IIS or attach a debugger to an IIS process, this type of environment generally doesn’t work well.' http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn145990.aspx We made this mistake through lack of experience and knowledge, but once you make it it's possible to work round it.

My first attempt to share features was to copy developer 1's project into developer 2's solution and add a reference to it in developer’s 2's project and add all the features to developer 2's package. Deploying this works fine for developer 2, until as I discovered if developer 1 detaches their solution from the debugger it retracts the solution based on the duplicated solution id from the farm and therefore from each developer's web application. Therefore developer 2 has the rug pulled out from underneath them. Although this is a part solution and seemed to work for a while, it took me a while to work out what was happening and what combinations of dev 1 and 2 deployments make each other’s work and not work.

So I found a better solution. Under the project properties in Visual Studio under SharePoint tab there is a combo box called 'Auto-retract after debugging'. This by default retracts the solution when the developer stops the attached debugger and pulls the features out from underneath the other developers. Unticking this box prevents the retract and leaves each developers individual solutions deployed at farm level and on reattaching to the debugger just replaces the solution with minimal fuss.

In my experience recycling the IIS application pool is so fast other developers don't even notice, but with a larger team than 2 this might become more prevalent, so perhaps someone else could add their experiences. I also guess unless the other develops try to attach at exactly the same time that the recycle is happening it'll be fine, so is a really small chance of having a cross over time, and simply detaching and reattaching will fix this if it is ever experienced.

Answer 2

You are on the wrong track with Terminal Services - its just not going to give you any separation.

A lot of people do recommend developing on W003/2008 server directly, and it does simplify some things like remote debugging.

I prefer the more traditional method of using VMWare to run virtual machines. These can be running on a local or remote host. Remote debugging is a little more complex to setup but still possible.

Finally - if possible then deploy to the bin dir rather than the GAC. This will make it much easier to deploy automatically after compilation.

Answer 3

No. In addition to the GAC there are all the SharePoint files in the 12 hive, such as features and site templates. It's not worth what you save on server costs.

(Of course if you don't use the GAC, but deploy to the bin folder, and you don't touch anything in the 12 hive, you can give each developer their own web application on the same server. But this approach puts a lot of restrictions on what they can do. It's still not worth it.)

Virtual machines will work, but they can be slow to develop on. For instance, you'll need to restart the application pool for every GAC deploy - which means a pause of maybe 15-60 seconds to reload the application, (depending on the hardware). This will become annoying.

Virtual machines work better for test and production, where you don't restart the application so often.

I recommend a physical server for each developer. This will minimize the code-deploy-test cycle time, and make sure they don't have to worry about stepping on each others toes.

Answer 4

So you're all going to remote in an fire up Visual Studio and be compiling stuff and restarting IIS, etc?

You're going to be stamping on each other's toes.

A wiser choice nowadays is to use Hyper-V (or some other virtualisation).

We use Windows Server 2008 on our laptops, and use Hyper-V to run our dev environments. We then have a dev environment (sandbox) each, and these have VS2008, SVN, Nunit, etc.

Our code is tested against each other thanks to CruiseControl on the only shared Hyper-V.

This has been great for us... we distribute the load, we can work on the move, we don't step on each others toes and if we need to do a demo we can switch Hyper-Vs and demo from the demo Hyper-V (branched from the dev one early on so that the environments are known).

Go virtual and don't look back.

PS: I've just seen your comment about one server... just put Hyper-V on that and run 3 instances. That's also what we do ;)

Answer 5

I don't know about installing the server on everything, but this sounds like an ideal task for Virtual Machines rather than physical ones- where I work we using VMWare a whole lot for this kind of work and it does very well.

It's also useful to be able to roll back to a snapshot when it comes to testing installation processes and so on.