How To Get IE6-Friendly SharePoint 2007 Development Done on Windows Server 2008 R2

You’ve got to hand it to your parents. You were born at a good point in history, and it is pretty sweet to be living in the future. Granted, it’s never really the future. You know, like from a Buddhist perspective. But you can totally pull a telephone out of your pocket and watch Marty McFly rock a pink hoverboard on it. If that’s what you’re into.

And in terms of this blog, I prefer to write about the latest version of SharePoint. 2010, as of this missive. Because, from a sort of Buddhist perspective, SharePoint 2007 has been done, and is now just an idea. It has been the legacy version for about a year now. And the corner of the Internet where developers write about MOSS and WSS, I’m fairly certain, is full.

The Pledge

Regardless of the above granola sprinkles, I do my fair share of work in MOSS 2007. Because, like it or not, this platform was designed for businesses whose aim is probably something other than backing up the Brinks truck for the latest greatest version of portal software every few years.

The tooling advances that 2010s SharePoint and Visual Studio have provided are wondrous and pampering. They make it easy to forget that we used to need a Server version of Windows to have a SharePoint instance to develop against, and that, often, the contemporary browser of SharePoint 2007, Internet Explorer 6, was the main target for your work.

And as soon as you get up out of that ridiculous fetal position, I’ll walk you through how I get all of this done without having to step into what only appears to be an ordinary phone booth^[1].

The Turn

As I mentioned above, the foundation for a MOSS 2007 development machine is a Server version of Windows. I use 2008 R2, installed to a Virtual Hard Disk (.vhd) that I boot my laptop to directly. Running this late model of Windows Server lets me leverage IE9 to test for modern browser conditions. And because it is shiny, anachronism be damned.

But it also leads me straight to the rub of this setup: How can I also test my work for IE6 compatibility?

Internet Explorer, of course, does not allow multiple versions to be installed simultaneously on the same machine. Many well-meaning, golden-hearted folk have attempted to circumvent this web dev-lemma with offerings like IETester and MultipleIE. The former comes close in some cases to accurately emulating the adorable quirks of the browser we love to hate. If you need to ship pixel-perfect branding, though, close just won’t cut mustard. And I’m not sure what’s going on with MultipleIE, but whatever it is, it was not going on in my Windows Server 2008 R2 environment.

So, at this point in devising my rig, the best option seemed to be to virtualize, running IE6 on a Windows XP VM within my already-virtual server. Now, I see what you’re thinking there, but this is no time for a cheap Inception reference. We need to go deeper.

The release of Windows 7 (the client edition of my chosen Windows Server version) brought us the virtual security blanket we call Windows XP Mode. This would be the ideal fix—a virtual Windows XP machine, running bona fide IE6, with the latest Internet Explorer running on the host system so I can eat my cake, too.

The Prestige

But I’m running Windows Server—XP Mode is only supported for client editions of Windows. And maybe I’m a joker for even trying, but enabling Hyper-V on an already virtual Windows Server made my laptop angry in that special kind of way. You know, when you genuflect for the entire time that the subsequent restore is chugging? That way.

I had all but given up on achieving an IE6-friendly MOSS 2007 development setup on Windows Server 2008 R2, turning my attention instead to strategically unclenching, and to assuring my family that I was still a willing participant in whatever lives they had going on in the meantime.

Okay, now—do you see that? Right where I let go and let God? That’s about when I happened on VMLite.

The good people over at VMLite have worked some manner of dark magick that leverages VirtualBox to deliver a Windows XP Mode machine without requiring hardware virtualization, allowing it to hum along contentedly in more or less whatever odd hosting arrangement you can dream up.

Figure 1. My fully operational SharePoint 2007 battle station

Finally, I was afforded the luxury of testing my SharePoint 2007 work in a very particular CSS insane asylum. One that we can hope will very soon be done, and will very soon be just an idea.

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1. If you’re from the United States and you’re awesome, that’s a Bill & Ted reference. If you’re English or just super into the Nerdist, it’s a Doctor Who nod. Dimensionally transcendental, in either case. ↩