SharePoint Tip: Where to find the SharePoint Assemblies for development.

I think one of the biggest questions that I see being asked by new comers to SharePoint development is “Where can I download Microsoft.SharePoint.dll??” or “Where can I get my hands on Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.dll ??”.

Well the answer is simple, these assemblies can be found on your server that is running SharePoint. Simply copy these assemblies from your SharePoint server to your development machine and reference them.

Because these assemblies are multi-part, you may witness errors/warnings such as ‘The dependency ‘dqsprvm’ could not be found.’. You can more than likely ignore these, but if they end up being show-stoppers, you might want to export the missing dependencies from the GAC of the server and place them within the GAC of the development machine. You can map the GAC to a virtual drive using the subst tool. (subst g: c:\windows\assembly\GAC) where g: is your virtual drive.

What I also recommend is installing the SharePoint Products and Technologies 2003 Software Development Kit (SDK):

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=AA3E7FE5-DAEE-4D10-980F-789B827967B0&displaylang=en

I also recommend that you install the visual studio web part templates which will allow you to build web parts much quicker:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=CAC3E0D2-BEC1-494C-A74E-75936B88E3B5&displaylang=en

So where are the assemblies anyway?

%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\ISAPI

Where %SYSTEMDRIVE% generally translates into C:\
(C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60\ISAPI)

In this directory, you will find all of the binaries for SharePoint, as well as most of the ASP.NET pages and ASP.NET web services that SharePoint exposes. So if you ever wanted to add a new web service into SharePoint, this is the place to deploy it (be careful with that one, though)!