Sharepoint Workflow Development (2 part question)

Question

I'm trying to develop some SharePoint workflows for the company I work for, and I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of the technology. Normally when I want to familiarize myself with something, I just play with it, look at the properties, find all the methods, etc.

When I fire up Visual Studio and try to create a SharePoint workflow, it gives me an error indicating I don't have a reference to "Microsoft.SharePoint.dll". Someone told me that it was normal to see that because you have to do all your development on the SharePoint Server itself if you want to do workflows. Is this true?

If so, is there anyone out there that has successfully developed SharePoint workflows in a multi-developer environment without resorting to any "hacks"?? Thank you for reading and your responses...

Answer 1

If you want to create a Sharepoint workflow using the Sharepoint Templates, you need to have a Windows 2003 or 2008 Server running Sharepoint. Essentially, that is true for all Sharepoint development: For it to be really efficient, you need to run Visual Studio on a Sharepoint Server. This in turn means that every developer needs his own Sharepoint server and then you have one additional "Staging"-Server where you deploy and test your combined solutions. Suddenly, that MSDN Subscription looks very attractive :-)

As for your Workflow learning question: I can highly recommend "Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System" by Apress.