Development with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004

Mark DiGiovanni : Optimizing Development with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004

"Generally speaking, my pre-Virtual PC development configuration installed on my laptop consisted of a single installation of Windows XP Pro, SQL 2000, Visual Studio.NET 2003, NUnit, and various other tools. With this configuration, I developed several different applications.

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To make a long story short, I successfully developed my portions of the portal within the VPC image. The standard install on my laptop now consists only of Windows XP Pro, Office 2003, Virtual PC 2004, and some other software. I did not install any development software on the base image. I created a base development VPC image consisting of Windows XP Pro and Visual Studio.NET 2003 with the most recent service packs. I derive all other VPC images (except those requiring Windows Server) from this one. I physically copy the image, rename it, and run NewSID. The virtual hard disk is configured to be "dynamically Expanding" rather than "Differencing." I do this mainly because it can take some time to save the differences.

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This is a pretty cool post on how Mark uses Virtual PC (VPC) on his notebook. His approach is pretty interesting...

Boys and girls, if you're a developer and not using VPC then you are missing out. I have used it more times than I can count when troubleshooting platform related bugs.

VPC is also a must have for people who like to beta test or play with different OS's (Gee, that seems to describe someone I know... ;)