Brennan’s Blog

I am running multiple virtual instances of Windows XP for development using Virtual Server R2. I do it to isolate diverse development environments, such as .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. I am told the latest "security" updates now include an update to Microsoft Genuine Advantage (WGA) and I am hearing rumblings that it may put me at a major disadvantage.

I purchased a new Dell E1705 a short while back so that I could do some .NET development after hours. I have an MSDN account and have full access to all of the software in the subscriber downloads as well as the product keys. It is a great resource which is well worth the money. But I only have a single license to run WinXP to host these development instances. I have set up many development instances to work on various .NET projects, such as the INETA Javascript Banner. It is really an ideal way to do development. But if WGA shuts down these environments I would be forced to run every development application on my host system which would introduce conflicts and make it more difficult to maintain a clean and reliable development environment.

I am running with legitimate licencing keys from my MSDN account for WinXP and all installed Microsoft software. But is that enough to ensure the latest update to WGA will not shut down my development environments?

Why run multiple isolated environments?

With Visual Studio 2003 to do web development you must have IIS. But Visual Studio 2005 it has it's own mini web server so IIS is not required. By not having a IIS installed I can avoid numerous headaches and potential security holes. And if I choose to try out the new beta for Microsoft Office or Sharepoint, I can do so by duplicating an existing virtual instance. When I am done trying it out and I can simply delete that instance. There is no need to worry about a messy uninstall which may leave behind floating dependencies or registry keys which may interfere with the software that remains.

I have also set up a fresh development environment in under 20 minutes. I needed to use Visual Studio 2005 but it was not installed on the machine I was going to use. So instead of using the DVD installer which can take up to 4 hours to run, I simply copied over a Virtual PC image of WinXP with Visual Studio 2005 and fired it up in Virtual Server R2 and I had a working environment. And most of the time was spent waiting for the large image to copy over the wire. And the Virtual Server installer comes in at a tiny 28MB! It is trivial to get a new environment up and running with a fresh install.

Virtual instances are also easy to manage. If I need to clear up space on my laptop, I can connect to my external drives and drop a 16GB virtual instance onto the external drive to open up some space. If Visual Studio 2005 were installed on the host system it would not be as simply as a copy, paste and delete as it is with Virtual PC instances. And just as easily, I can copy an instance over to another machine. At Microsoft conferences I often see they do their presentations within Virtual PC instances where they work with applications and make changes to files and databases as a live demo during the presentation. After they complete a presentation they can restore the virtual instance to a backup copy and do the same presentation again. Doing the same without Virtual PC would require a good deal of work with a backup tool like Norton Ghost as well as multiple reboots. No thanks.