I've been dragged into the world of MOSS 2007 development. It's not been an easy start with the requisite build of the virtual development environment taking forever to complete. The pain with this has mainly been due to the ton of updates that follow the clean install of Windows Server 2003, MOSS 2007, Visual Studio 2008 and Office 2007. I could have sought install media with the latest service packs and saved time - lesson learned.

In an attempt to improve the VMs performance, I’d decided that once the install for MOSS was successfully finished, I’d relocate the VHD to an external HD. Unfortunately I discovered that under the Windows 7 Virtual PC, if Undo Disks is enabled it doesn’t tolerate a relocation. Virtual PC deletes the Undo disks when you try to re-point the VM settings to a new location and you don’t seem get an option to cancel out of this. Another lesson learned.

Starting again, this time with no undo disks. I’d just copy the VHD at the completion of each installation stage, dropping the VHD into a suitably named folder - a bit like taking a snapshot.

While this has going been, I've been casting my eyes over a few SharePoint books in preparation for my development training.

Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System.

Microsoft SharePoint Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# 2005.

Pro SharePoint 2007 Development Techniques.

The first thing I need to do is get to grips with is SharePoint Configuration, then I can move onto understanding the various development tasks.