Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows 7

Here’s a quick summary of how I installed the public beta of SharePoint Server 2010.

Minimum Requirements:
- Windows 7 64 bit: What this means is that your workstation needs to be 64 bit and you need to have the 64 bit version of Windows 7 installed.

Setup:
The key document that you need to follow for installing on Windows 7 is this article: Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server

Key Notes:
- This was installed on Windows 7 Build 7100
- I had UAC turned off
- I already had Visual Studio 2010 Beta before installing SharePoint
- You need to manually download and install the pre-requisites for SharePoint 2010
- You need to extract the setup (using /extract), change an xml file before being able to run setup on Windows 7.

Minor Deviation:
The only part of the guide that I was forced to skip was #5 of ‘Step 3: Install SharePoint’

The reason was that the install for the SQL Server patch kept asking for the other files in the multi-part zip. (Remember to unzip the file even though it has a .exe extension)

Summary:
Excluding the download times it took about 30 minutes to install SharePoint server on my Dell XPS laptop which has 4GB of RAM.

Although there is no guide published yet I was able to install Office Web Apps on my laptop as well, that guide will follow next.