Virtual PC 2004 continues to rock my world...
Just a quick note to developers who have not yet discovered Virtual PC 2004...do it now!
I continue to be amazed by this product and how it has transformed my daily work experience.
I'm able to have multiple Whidbey builds, multiple operating systems and even guaranteed-isolated-from-the-network-and-my-real-hard-disk environments. No longer do I have to risk my real machine to test a piece of shareware. No longer do I need to say, "drat, I'm running XP and I need to test this on IIS6 (which only runs on Win2k3)". I'm blessed to have a machine that has 2Gb of ram so I can run 3 512Mb VPCs simultaneously, all without swapping.
But most important of all: IT RUNS AS FAST AS THE REAL MACHINE! And this is on a LAPTOP not some QUAD XEON.
I know there must be a bit of a slowdown to translate file system calls into file access calls but everything is so fast that I have found myself in situations where I had a VPC in full-screen mode and started hunting for one of my "normal" applications only to discover that I was in a VPC and forgot it wasn't the real deal.
If you have an MSDN subscription, you can download it from Subscriber Downloads.
And one final note: If you do have an MSDN subscription, you've got to subscribe to the download notifications via RSS. In my previous life, as Director of Engineering for a small (20+ devs) ISV, I had an opportunity to be on a panel at the last PDC in which the MSDN folks were asking customers how to better provide MSDN content. I was very insistent that I wanted up-to-the-minute notification when new content was available. I wish I'd been a blogger then, I would have suggested using RSS! Nice to know someone was listening!
