Do you use the right SharePoint development environment?
Development for SharePoint is very different depending upon whether you are online or using On-Premises SharePoint.
For SharePoint Online
All you need is VSCode – all modern customizations are doing using the SharePoint Framework (SPFx).
💡 Best practice is to isolate your code as much as possible during development/staging. Unfortunately it's not easy to come up with a full-blown dedicated Test Tenant.
As a minimum, make sure you test all your custom code in a dedicated Site Collection to avoid as much side effects as possible.
See our rule to modern SharePoint Development.
For SharePoint 2016, 2019 or SE
- It's very important to correctly setup a SharePoint environment for development. Correctly configured, this will save you a lot of trouble later on
- From time to time, you can seriously damage a SharePoint installation during development and it is best not to install SharePoint on your everyday working machine. Additionally, when you start a new SharePoint project you don't want to carry all the luggage from a previous customization that could potentially affect your new project
- Virtual machines can be fired up and shut down easily
- Virtual machines can be relocated on a different server and thus it doesn't waste developers' own computer resources
- Virtual machines can be copied and brought to a client for demonstration
- Very easy for someone to quickly create a new SharePoint server to quickly test or experiment with SharePoint
- Bad - There might be more work required to activate additional servers. SharePoint Farms are a lot of work. E.g. Search Server VMs
