Windows development environments

When building and deploying solutions in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint environments, it’s important to have a well-structured development setup. From local development on our machines to deploying live in production, each stage comes with its own tools and processes.

Here’s an overview of the key tools and techniques to optimize our workflow, with a focus on using Windows as the core operating system for local development.

Local development – why WSL 2 is a must-have

The Windows file system and frontend tools are notoriously slower in certain operations, particularly when handling tasks that involve heavy file system access, such as managing large numbers of files, running package managers such as npm, or executing build processes for frontend projects.

This performance bottleneck can significantly impact development speed, especially in modern web development environments such as the SharePoint Framework, where frequent...