Advice for setting up development environment

I work on a web development team that builds asp.net web applications and I know little about true sharepoint custom development.  I'm preparing for a meeting tomorrow I am having with our sharepoint team that will be designing our backend sharepoint infrastructure.    Since this is all new and no one here is an expert with true sharepoint development I need some advice.

From the persepective of a .net developer what are the core things that I need to make sure our sharepoint infrastructure team should know in order to make sure we have a backend infrastructure that will provide the proper environment for custom sharepoint development? 

A lot depends on the type of development you are doing in SharePoint, but most likely you'll need a solid virtual machine in VMware or Virtual PC running Windows Server 2003/8, SQL Server, MOSS, Visual Studio, and SharePoint Designer if you're doing branding.

You'll need at least a gig to dedicate to your VM, but upwards of 2GB will suite you better.  You can check the system requirements for the Microsoft offered SharePoint VHD.

Hi Brandon,

I personally prefer a virtual environment for developers.  Each having their own sandbox will help reduce conflicts that arrise during development.  Make sure to give yourself plenty of disk space and memory; a minimum of 2 to 3 GB memory if you are going to run MOSS and Visual Studio together.

The next, and even more important, question is what are you doing with regards to your build server and QA staging environment.  I don't recommend going directly from your development sandbox directly to production; in any environment.

Thats a good question about our QA environment.  Due to our rather fragmented server management structure I don't believe that there is anything being done at this point.  Although that is something that is going to be discussed in tomorrow's meeting. 

Should the build server be a seprate box from the QA / Staging box or could that just be another role for the QA / Staging box to take on? 

Hi Brandon,

Just an FYI; this entire environment can be virtualized.  I prefer a dedicated, centralized build machine.  This is the machine all developers code is pulled from source code control, built and tested before it is ever sent to QA.  I also recommend you have scripts to pull source code and automate the build process.  The resulting build can then be installed on the build machine.  Once everything is tested by the devlopmen team, the same install can be run on the QA server.

Ah, okay I got it now.  This really isn't as different from our standard development environment as I thought it might be.  Thanks for the info guys, it is greatly appreciated!