Scenario

I’ve been looking up options for setting up a development SharePoint 2013 enviornment to use on my personal laptop. I want to do so in order to teach myself .NET development and Provider Host Apps on SharePoint 2013. There are many options out there to create such a dev enviornment, but it’s very confusing for me. I’m a rather new developer (about 2 years of experience with mostly front-end development and little engineering background), and I’ve only done the very basics of system administrative work. I’ve never installed or build my own SharePoint server.

What I would like to do is to be able to remote desktop to a virtual SharePoint which I have full rights to and be able to create .NET applications/solutions which I can deploy on my own. I also plan in the future to master my PowerShell skills as well as learning how to configure some backend elements such as SQL servers and databases.

Question

Is there a service or resource out there that I can do that? I’m willing to spend money if I need to subscribe to a virtual service that can provide this.

If I need to build or install this type of enviornment, may I ask for someone to point me out to an easy step by step instructions that can guide me through the process?

Thanks!