New to Developing within Virtual PCs? Read the Getting Started with Virtual PC 2007 Article

Maybe I should have titled this entry “Why I use Virtual Environments for Development”. If you want to skip my ramblings and just get to the “Getting Started with Virtual PC 2007”, click here. Otherwise, read my ramblings/perspective on the subject.

<my perspective>

If you have seen any of my SharePoint Developer Videos (Found here) or my SharePoint Workshop Series (Found here) then you no doubt have seen that I am “BIG” on using Virtual Machines for my development environment. My reasons are many, but the primary reasons are:

I like to have a "Production-Level development environment with a Stable version of Visual Studio 2008, very few add-ins and 3rd party tools. So, that when I am on a tight-deadline and don’t have time to figure out why my Development environment is slow, buggy, reboots, etc., I can depend on this Virtual PC to give me a stable experience.

I also have a Beta development environment, where I will install any and everything that I find on the web that might be able to make me “More productive!'” This is the environment where I will install “tools and add-ins” and try them out for a while, and after testing I will move them to the production environment (see point #1). If I have the least bit of problems with them, I will revert the Virtual PC environment back to the state before I installed the tool (I prefer this than trying to uninstall BETA software).

I also have a MOSS 2007 Development Environment, with Visual Studio 2008 and Office Client (for integration development/testing), as well as a WSS 3.0 (No MOSS 2007) development environment.

I still have a Visual Studio 2005 with MOSS 2007 and a Visual Studio 2005 with WSS 3.0 only.

Those are just a few of the combinations, I also have Virtual PC’s for:

Windows Server 2008 Beta

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta

Windows Server 2003 with IIS and ASP.NET (resembling a production server, no Visual Studio)

Windows Server 2003 with MOSS 2007 (resembling a production server, no Visual Studio)

Windows Server 2003 with SQL Server only (resembling a production server, no Visual Studio)

Visual Studio 2008 Development environment with Windows XP (My main development VPC is Vista-based)

Recently, a Vista Virtual PC with Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8) Beta

And, various Virtual PC’s with version of Linux builds on it, with and without the Eclipse IDE

The interesting thing, is that because I only have Office (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel) a browser (IE 7), Virtual PC 2007, and various Security software (Virus checker and Spyware checker) on my Host Machine (Host = your machine that runs all of the Virtual PC’s), I never have to rebuild my machine! When I did my development, installed a bunch of IE Add-ons, misc. tools and utilities to play with, etc. on my main machine (Host Machine), I would have to rebuild it at least once per year, if not more often!'

I love Virtual PC (because it’s FREE and I work for Microsoft ), but if you don’t want to use it, try Parallels or VMWare. But whatever you do, please consider using Virtual Machine Environments.

</my perspective>

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Again, here’s the link to the “Getting Started with Virtual PC 2007, by Josh Bolling”: Click here

If you want to download Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (FREE): Click here

~Robert Shelton

Technorati Tags: How to examples,sharePoint,moss

Saturday, June 14, 2008 10:01 AM

Your Comments.

# re: New to Developing within Virtual PCs? Read the Getting Started with Virtual PC 2007 Article

From VPC How do i access resources of Host machine.

Resources eg. (SQLServer, Access an IIS website)

eg. I do not wish to reinstall SQLServer inside VPC, Its already available on HOST machine and i did like to use the same.

I tried using Host IP, but it does not detect.

Regards
jignesh_desai at hotmail

Left by Jignesh at 7/16/2008 4:01 AM

# re: New to Developing within Virtual PCs? Read the Getting Started with Virtual PC 2007 Article

Jignesh,

An OS running in a VPC is just like any physical machine. Therefore, you'd access the resuources just as you would if it was installed on a physical machine.

You need to make sure the VPC setup is similar to any other machine in your network. Meaning that the IP Address, Subnet Mask, etc. is within the same range as your own. That the VPC has been given a physical Network card to work with. That there are no Firewall issues between the host and the Virtual Machine, in other words that the VPC doesn't block remote connections via the Windows Firewall and that the application that you are trying to access is actually available on whatever IP or Network Drive address you are trying to access.

Again, it's just like any physical PC, so if it were me, I would PING the server first and go from there. If I can ping it from the host, then that means that I can see the VPC. If I can see the VPC from the host than the rest of it is configuration issues with the source that I am trying to access or some sort of firewall issue, just as it would be on a real machine.

~Robert

Left by Robert Shelton at 7/16/2008 9:33 AM

Your Reply.

Comment Form.

Fields denoted with a "*" are required.

*Your name:

*Subject:

You may also like to leave your email or website.

*Your message:

Please add 5 and 1 and type the answer here:

Enter the code shown above:

Preview Your Comment.

# re: New to Developing within Virtual PCs? Read the Getting Started with Virtual PC 2007 Article
From VPC How do i access resources of Host machine.

Resources eg. (SQLServer, Access an IIS website)

eg. I do not wish to reinstall SQLServer inside VPC, Its already available on HOST machine and i did like to use the same.

I tried using Host IP, but it does not detect.

Regards
jignesh_desai at hotmail

Left by Jignesh at 7/16/2008 4:01 AM
# re: New to Developing within Virtual PCs? Read the Getting Started with Virtual PC 2007 Article
Jignesh,

An OS running in a VPC is just like any physical machine. Therefore, you'd access the resuources just as you would if it was installed on a physical machine.

You need to make sure the VPC setup is similar to any other machine in your network. Meaning that the IP Address, Subnet Mask, etc. is within the same range as your own. That the VPC has been given a physical Network card to work with. That there are no Firewall issues between the host and the Virtual Machine, in other words that the VPC doesn't block remote connections via the Windows Firewall and that the application that you are trying to access is actually available on whatever IP or Network Drive address you are trying to access.

Again, it's just like any physical PC, so if it were me, I would PING the server first and go from there. If I can ping it from the host, then that means that I can see the VPC. If I can see the VPC from the host than the rest of it is configuration issues with the source that I am trying to access or some sort of firewall issue, just as it would be on a real machine.

~Robert

Left by Robert Shelton at 7/16/2008 9:33 AM

Jump Menu

So what are all these buttons for?

Personalize

Text Size

Layout

Navigation Position

Robert Shelton's Blog

Struggling to make sense of it all....

New to Developing within Virtual PCs? Read the Getting Started with Virtual PC 2007 Article

Your Comments.

Your Reply.

Preview Your Comment.

Me

Tag Cloud

Archives

Post Categories

Links

Syndicate