Cloud-based SharePoint 2010 installations for sole developer?

What is the best way for a sole developer to have access to a SharePoint 开发者_JAVA百科2010 installation for testing administration and development?

Cloudshare has an offering "in the cloud" for SharePoint - paid by the month, not by usage.

I would say download the Foundation version of SharePoint (which is free) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee263910.aspx#tab=1 and install it on either a physical or virtual windows server.

If no server available then install it on your vista or windows 7 machine, note that it must be a x64 machine. Here is the official guide, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx

Stay away from cloud solutions, SharePoint consumes a lot of performance and need an entire server or computer for it self, otherwise it will be a painful process of learning and developing for SharePoint.

Speaking to your comment about cloud-based solutions, there are companies that offer managed SharePoint hosting environments, but you will be limited in the access you have, and custom development will be difficult to impossible. Microsoft's Office 365 platform fits into this niche.

It's entirely possible to build a SharePoint environment, be it for development or production usage, using virtual machines from cloud providers; but this is essentially only saving you from purchasing and maintaining hardware (which, in many cases can be benefit enough). I've personally worked on SharePoint instances for development hosted in both EC2 and GoGrid virtual machines as a primary development machine.

Why would you do this? What's the business reason apart from the buzzword?

Cloudshare apart, for anything over a couple of months its just not going to save you any money - you can get an unbranded PC that will have enough horsepower to run SharePoint 2010 for about $500.

Furthermore, you will be better off developing on and running SP on your local machine - the tools built in to VS 2010 assume that's your setup and whilst its not impossible to do it remotely you make things harder for yourself for no real benefit.