Tips to Set up Visual Studio 2012 to work with SharePoint 2013

If you are getting started with App, Office 2013 add-in, or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 development, you will notice that there is no option in Visual Studio 2012 after you first install it as in screen shot #1. It was little confused for me to get Visual Studio 2012 for the first 2013 project and here are some tips for any new SharePoint Server 2013 developers.

1. First install “Office Developers Tools for Visual Studio 2012”.  The easiest way is to follow the link.

When you get to the point to accept the license, you might notice that it's disabled and even after you view the license. The trick is to  view the license terms first and then click "Run" from the window.

If you have not installed "Microsoft Web Developer Tools", you would need to do it as the instructions. Follow the instruction and you will have “Office Developers Tools for Visual Studio 2012” installed. You should have all project templates for App, Office 2013 add-in, or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013available.

2. If you run into the following error -  “An error occurred whilst trying to load some required components, Please ensure the following prerequisite components are installed.”,  Please follow instructions provided by Tim Quinlan to resolve it.

3. Configure right .Net version for SharePoint projects. If the code will be deployed to SharePoint 2013, you should select .Net 4.0. If the code can be running out side SharePoint 2013 server, you could leverage 4.5 version. To simplify the development process and deployment build process, we might recommend to use 4.0 version for all our current SharePoint 2013 projects.

4. When you select C# for the first time to bring up Visual Studio 2012, you might want to change the documentation level to bring many online help to the tool. 

Please note there are still some SharePoint 2010 project templates inside the Visual studio 2012 and you need to be very careful to use .Net 3.5 if you really need to develop 2010 solutions.

5. Run the Visual Studio 2012 as administrator, otherwise, you will not be able to validate any site URL even the login account has full permission. This may save you lots of time!

6. If you could not create the new projects in Visual studio 2012 with the following error, you would need to install Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012. 

 

Have fun on SharePoint 2013 development!