Phew - it's been a while since I posted. It's not that I've not got nothing to say just that I've been a wee bit distracted but some real nasty problems.

On the good side however MS finally got round to releasing the RTM version of the WSS 3.0 SDK. However in a big case of yaboo-shucks-to-you it's not installable on a XP or Vista PC. Well - not unless you know the (albeit rather easy) magic key.

I know that everything you see, read and hear about MOSS development keeps on screaming that you should develop on a server, for me that's not an answer - in fact IMHO it's just downright wrong.

I've got a good development environment on my laptop. I have various 3rd party tools and VS add-ons that I've installed on it. I've got loads of extra stuff besides. In other words - it's my development environment.

"Guns for show, Knives for a Pro" - Soap : Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels.

OK, so MOSS development's not quite the same as ripping off a brutal London based gang of their hard stolen dosh - however the theory still stands - use the right tool for the right job. Develop on a PC, test on a server. At least that's my personal view.

And all this was working fine for me until today. I'd copied the requisite DLL's from my MOSS Server to my laptop and registered them into the GAC. I could do all my development on my laptop then copy the files over using a simple batch script to the server prior to deployment. My post build script checked to make sure it would only execute the deployment side of things when it was on the server. All was happy in my world.

However today I find out that the newly released RTM version of the WSS 3.0 SDK won't install on my Vista development environment. Fortunately there's a very simple solution </rant>

Simply fire up regedit (or your favorite Registry Editor) an create yourself a new set of keys under HKLM called SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0. Now create a REG_SZ value called SharePoint and set it to equal Installed.

That's it - everything else should then install nicely.