I recently setup a sharepoint 2013 server for some app testing. I used Sharepoint Foundation 2013 which is a free version which has a few features missing from the enterprise version. Installing was a bit of a drag, there were several prerequisites that where not immediately obvious to me. Some of these were:

• Server needed to be a member of a domain
• The ftp service needed to be installed
• The iis 6 scripting tools needed to be installed
• The software protection service needed to be set to manual
• There may have been several other services that I needed to change from disabled to manual start but I can’t remember at the moment
• The prerequisite installer amd setup forces sql 2008 express to be installed and used. I had to do some work to uninstall 2008 and setup the the sharepoint databases on the sql 2012 I already had installed.

I also attempted to setup forms authentication. Unfortunately I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) setup forms authtnetication through the simple membership provider that I had from a MVC 4 app. I ended up configuring the ASP.NET forms authentication provider the old fashion way of creating the database and configuring web.config files. I really don’t understand why this functionality isn’t built into sharepoint in some way.

Also, it might be obvious but you can debug a sharepoint app unless your running visual studio on the same server as sharepoint. Which reminds me, I had some trouble uploading sharepoint apps. I wonder what that was… Maybe I should have kept notes when I was actually doing the work.