Recently I have switched from VMWare to VirtualBox for my SharePoint Development. So far it really works good. I have prepared this guide for configuring VirtualBox for SharePoint-hosted apps. That means we need a new adapter with a static ip address. All the steps done inside the virtual machine are applicable for VMWare and Hyper-V, too. This guide does not cover the full configuration of the app environment, it covers only the network and dns settings needed for SharePoint-hosted apps on Premises in a Development machine.

This is an open question about the domains for SharePoint apps. On Technet: Configure an environment for apps for SharePoint (SharePoint 2013) we can read the following:

You must configure a new name in Domain Name Services (DNS) to host the apps. To help improve security, the domain name should not be a subdomain of the domain that hosts the SharePoint sites. For example, if the SharePoint sites are at Contoso.com, consider ContosoApps.com instead of App.Contoso.com as the domain name.

In my project I deploy some apps directly through the ObjectModel directly with PowerShell. The apps are built with TFS I have a script that installs or updates apps if there is a new version of the app. Previously I used Import-SPAppPackage to compare the version and productid with an existing app instance, but often I get this error:

The provided App differs from another App with the same version and product ID.

As a SharePoint architect or a SharePoint developer, you must have been thinking about the benefits/limitations of SharePoint apps a lot. I want to point out one of them today, which is very important: using custom webservices deployed to SharePoint inside apps. That is impossible and it is designed to be so due to the security architecture in the sharepoint app framework. I have read much about SharePoint apps (books, whitepapers, blog posts) and stumbled over these two contradictive statements:

Have you noticed that you can right-click a web application project in Visual Studio and convert it to a provider hosted app? Well why not? Basically your own website and a SharePoint manifest is all what you need for a provider hosted app. This discovery today made me think about all legacy web apps out there that can be converted to SharePoint apps.  Traditionally we had to add plain links to external applications or embed them into an IFrame by hardcoding it in an .aspx page or a Page Viewer WebPart. A web application that should be converted to a SharePoint app can be any web app, not only asp.net web site. For a year ago, I had a little nodejs project to try out mongodb and knockout.js: Anvaska which I published as a heroku app:

Recently I had an exciting mail conversation with Thomas Deutsch. He came up with an idea how to fasten the development of apps. This smart approach is called “Provider Hosted First”. See Thomas’ original blog post. Here are some highlights: What you actually do is a local website which runs in grunt server:

localhost:9000
```Then a SharePoint-hosted app is created with an SPAppIframe that refers to that local app site. Genious!!! Some key features of this approach:

*   This local app contains a livereload script. Your sharepoint app is updated every time you save your css, js, html file in your IDE
*   Grunt minifies, bundles your assets
*   Grunt runs your tests automatically when your content is modified
*   The SharePoint app can be on Premises, on Office 365, wherever you want it.

#### Video

\[caption id="attachment\_2808" align="alignnone" width="630"\][![See the video how it looks like to develop using this approach](https://sharepointkunskap.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/sp-app-002.png?w=630)](http://www.screenr.com/LA8H) See the video how it looks like to develop using this approach\[/caption\]

## Comments from Wordpress.com


#### 
[Paul Tavares](http://paultavares.wordpress.com "paultavares1@gmail.com") - <time datetime="2013-07-10 02:59:34">Jul 3, 2013</time>

This is pretty cool and very similar to my current setup for developing javascript applications for SharePoint. I use a script to "deploy" updates from my PC to the folder in a document library. I'll try this out when I get around to playing with SP2013.
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[Björn]( "bjorn.roberg@bool.se") - <time datetime="2013-07-02 11:07:08">Jul 2, 2013</time>

Awesome! I'm gonna try that out!
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[Anatoly Mironov]( "mirontoli@gmail.com") - <time datetime="2013-07-02 15:31:33">Jul 2, 2013</time>

Great! When you go to Thomas Deutsch blog, you can download the source code for the solution.
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