Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7

Today it was my christening to installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 machine. The good news was that Microsoft has a great article on how to do it. This lists all the KB updates you need to install and all the pre-requisites. It also talks about unpacking the Setup.exe and changing the config.

But as with everything else, it was too good to be true. So I ran into various problems as I was about to start the configuration of SharePoint 2010.

Problem 1: If yours is a fresh install of Windows 7 like mine, then you will get this error.

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Thanks to Sensoft2000 I found out what the issue was. It looked like it didn’t have the Windows Identity Foundation pack on the machine. It is part of .NET 3.5 SP1, so I would suggest installing SP1 for .NET 3.5 before installing SharePoint 2010 or VS 2010.

Problem 2:

An error occurred during the processing of . Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

This time it was the MSChart component that was missing as kindly pointed out by Sandeep. This is not required if you already have .NET 4.

Hope this saves you some time.

Happy SharePointing J