When you would like to get started w/ SharePoint 2013 development, you’ve to install the corresponding Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 RC. When you’ve started developing SharePoint apps using Napa as I’ve described earlier today in this post, you’ve perhaps noticed the Open in Visual Studio button on the bottom left.
Figure 1: Open in Visual Studio button in Napa
When clicking this button, a small executable will be downloaded to your computer. This program is responsible for checking if all requirements are available on the current machine. If all requirements are installed, the SharePoint app will be opened in Visual Studio 2012. If you haven’t installed all the requirements, the ProjectLauncher program will fire up WebPI4 (WebPlatformInstaller Version 4). When WebPI is started for the first time and Visual Studio 2012 RC is already installed on your machine, WebPI will try to install the following.
Figure 2 – WebPI Installation Dialog
Just ignore the red warning icon, I don’t know what it means and there is no tooltip or something like that providing more information. Perhaps this warning icon should explain that other dependencies are required (as mentioned under SharePoint Developer tools, but anyway.
If you accept the license terms and WebPI has finished downloading the installation process ended up with this great error message (logs are as useful as the messages in this dialog)
Figure 3 – Great error messages in WebPI
To get more details on the errors during installation you should click the direct download within the Installation dialog. This will forward you to the download site for the SharePoint 2013 Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 RC – Preview “What a great product name, only Windows Azure is missing in this product name.” When trying to install the tools w/ the original setup file, I got the following error.
Figure 4 – Using the original setup gives more meaningful errors
Figure 5 – Uninstalling EWAS Managed API 1.1 fixed it for me.
And because I’m a SharePoint app developer :), I went to the control panel and uninstalled the EWS Managed API 1.1 (Figure 5) and finally I was able to install the developer tools, which are required for my upcoming post on the SharePoint app model. :)