Sharepoint Development Environment for SBS 2008R2

Question

I want to customize sharePoint web app to suit company's requirement. The goal is to create few per-populated task items within a folder when folder gets created. Both folder and task Items are custom content type in a same list. And so SharePoint Designer does not allow to create such a workflow. Because of this limitation i have to dive into Visual Studio/C# solution.

I did some research to build development environment (Virtual Machine )for this using Windows Server 2008R2 + MOSS 2007 + SQL Server 2008. But there are no solution for how to do that with SBS 2008R2. I have following questions.

1. Our production server is SBS2008R2 SP2 + WSS 3.0 + SQL 2005 + Exchange 2007 So do i need to set up same exact same environment on development machine?

2. How do I deploy changes to my production server if everything works on test environment.

3. Is WSS3.0 and SharePoint Foundation are the same? I know MOSS is extension to WSS.

I have development experience in VB.net and Java so actual coding is not a problem, but I am new to sharePoint and its terminology. So please forgive me if i sound silly.

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

In the order of questions.

1. The most recommended way for SharePoint development is to have the same test / development farm as production. But for your particular case (environment and task) your development environment seems to be enough.
2. As you are developing solution for SharePoint in Visual Studio you can create WSP for deployment directly there. You haven't specified VS version, but for example VS2010 has an OOTB project templates for SharePoint 2007/2010, VS2012 also has (but I'm not sure about SP2007), for VS2005 and VS2008 there were some extensions / addons for this. The wsp should hold all customizations, so you can easy perform deployment, updates, etc.
3. In time of 2007 there were two editions of SharePoint - light WSS3.0 and heavy MOSS, in 2010 it becomes to SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server. So SP Foundation 2010 is like a next version of WSS3.0

As for your task (auto tasks for folder) the best practice would be to create custom event receiver for folder item creation event.