I spent a few hours this weekend creating a SharePoint 2010 Developer environment using the RTM. For now, I'm approaching my dev build the same way I had my MOSS 2007 VM set up - a standalone MOSS install with Visual Studio installed. Because I wanted to use a 64bit guest OS (64bit Server 2008), I decided to use VirtualBox as my VM solution, if you want to use VirtualBox, you can get it here . I should note that when I set up my VirtualBox VM I gave it 20GB of hard drive space which was not enough so I had to expand the drive ( described later orange text ). I'd suggest going to 40 or more if you can because Windows,SP2010, SQL, and Visual Studio take up about 18GB (and setting it up right the first time will save you from having to do this . Once I had Server 2008 installed on a VirtualBox VM I downloaded the RTM version of SharePoint from MSDN. I then attached the SharePoint 2010 .iso file to my VM, opened the mounted SharePoint 2010 image and ran the Prerequisite ...