Virtual PC – get it, it rocks!
I simply could not even start to get ready for the demo’s on Monday without the help of Virtual PC (and if I keep bogging I won’t get them done in any case J).
What is Virtual PC: it allows you to run up another instance of a PC on your desktop in a window much like it was an application. This PC for all intensive purposes behaves like a totally separate machine. However, you can optionally share resources such as networks and disks.
It’s a huge timesaver as you can set up different PC’s for each demo and to also have them start at a known state (there is a nice feature called difference drives that allows you to roll back or accept any changes you made since you last booted up).
Admittedly you do need a reasonable specification machine to run Virtual PC the key factor is that you need enough memory in your PC to support both the host and guest operating system(s).
As I write this I’m on my desktop which is pretty beefy, it has 2GB of Ram – I’m running Windows XP as my host (bootable) OS and I have 3 Virtual PC sessions open
- Visual Studio 2005 Web Developer on Windows XP
- Visual Studio 2005 Team Studio on Windows XP
- Visual Studio 2005 Team System Foundation Server on Windows Server 2003
Why? Because I can I guess J
I think the truth is howeevr that I’m being pretty unstructured in getting the stuff working and comparing some features across the builds. The machines running like a dream with memory left spare and a lot of CPU idle time.