How to use Visual Studio to package a SharePoint solution if you don’t have SharePoint installed

I re-image my machine often, and when I fire up a Visual Studio 2010 for the first time, I always get an error “To work with this project, either SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010 must be installed on the system” or “A SharePoint server is not installed on this computer. A SharePoint server must be installed to work with SharePoint projects.”

Instead of installing SharePoint on my local machine, I usually just trick Visual Studio into thinking that SharePoint is installed. This link says to export the RegHive from a real SharePoint server and import it. I can never remember this.

To compile your code, you need to copy the “Microsoft.SharePoint.dll” and Microsoft.SharePoint.Security.dll from “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI” to your local drive and “Add Reference” to your project (Right Click References)

Haven’t worked with remote debugging to much, but this article describes it.