This one took some time to find so I thought I would post it here. The issue. You want to develop components that interact with the SharePoint API's but you are not running server and so you don't have the assemblies installed on your workstation to be able to reference them. Naturally I tried to find them on the server but had a hard time until I came across this search result:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms479423.aspx
In there added to the bottom is this important section:
To add a reference to the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly
- In Solution Explorer, right-click the project and click Add Reference on the shortcut menu.
- On the .NET tab of the Add Reference dialog box, select Windows SharePoint Services in the list of components, and then click OK.
To run or debug code that uses the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly, you must run the code on the server running Windows SharePoint Services. If you are using Visual Studio .NET on a remote computer, you cannot run or debug code that uses the object model. However, you can set a remote reference to the assembly to write code and see the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly repesented in the Code Editor. To add a remote reference in this way, perform the following steps:
- Click the Browse tab and navigate to Microsoft.SharePont.dll in Local_Drive\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\ISAPI folder on the server running Windows SharePoint Services. You may instead prefer to copy Microsoft.SharePoint.dll from this folder to a local drive on the remote computer and then open this local copy of the DLL. Click Open.