Comments on: Your Development Environment

By: Mark Nijhof

Mark Nijhof — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:19:34 +0000

You should really try out Microsoft Server 2008 Hyper-V for your development servers. Not sure about using it for desktop environment’s, just haven’t tried it.

By: AaronZalewski

AaronZalewski — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:39:04 +0000

Wow, I thought I was reading a post about myself. I got the Sager NP9261 with the same specs. Vista has however been a disappointment. Once my current gig is over I plan on wiping it for Win Server 2003 or 2008 perhaps.

Virtualization, can say enough good about it.

By: Sara

Sara — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:46:29 +0000

VMWare is good if used correctly. it does NOT replace source control. Don’t scoff, I’ve seen it.

By: Chris Patterson

Chris Patterson — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:33:54 +0000

+1 for VMware, without it many teams (ours included) would be suffering.

We have over 40 development virtual machines, many of which are clones of a baseline Windows Server 2003 environment. The way we’ve built our base images (which we just sysprep the drive and make copies of it when we deploy a new VM) allows us to deploy a new test or staging environment within an hour (instead of days). We also feel no pain when we destroy the environment on a whim when it is no longer needed.

Virtualization on the desktop is another win. A lot of times, particularly in a larger organization, you get strapped by the corporate IT with bizarre policies that make it impossible to get work done. By having a subdomain for all the development machines, a development group can have greater control over their build, deployment and testing strategies — all without the pain of domain group policy and login scripts ending up on test servers. The desktop virtualization story just makes it easier to develop on your local machine (Visual Studio 2005 isn’t even on my host OS, but that’s probably because there isn’t an OSX version of it yet!).

Cheers!