Installing SharePoint on Windows Vista

Check out this article on Bamboo Solutions to install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 on Vista x64/x86.

We use that here in our office for demo laptops. It allows us to get the best performance when demoing our SharePoint products at shows by letting us run SharePoint directly on the hardware instead of in a VM. This is definitely a case where two OSs are not better than one.

I don't recommend that you use this for your development setup. It is a good idea to develop against WSS since it locks you into a feature set that makes your code deployable to both WSS and MOSS. But by installing SharePoint in a VM, you can roll back with snapshots. In this sort of Vista+SharePoint environment, if SharePoint bombs, you have little luck getting back without a system restore.