Solution for developing Sharepoint object model in application outside IIS

When developing against the SharePoint object model in an application outside of IIS (service, console, Win forms etc..) you receive the error “FileNotFoundException” when creating an instance of the SPSite object.

Resolution

The user running the application needs to have the following permissions and group membership set:

• The user is a server farm administrator. 
• The user has Read and Write permissions on the content database. 
• The user is a site collection administrator. 
• The user has permissions to access the Windows SharePoint Services site or the SharePoint Server 2007 site through which the code iterates.