Hi Tom, Personally I host my development environment in a Virtual Box VM. Within that environment I have three virtual drives, one for the OS, one for code and one for SQL databases.
My rationale for this is: 1.I can migrate to a new machine or between machines simply by taking the VM and drives with me. I don't then have to reinstall the whole development environment and tools each time. (We replace our hardware every 2 years). 2. If I want to trial some Visual Studio add-on or other software for development, I can snaphsot the VM and recover if it all turns to merde 3. While I use TFS for version control and backup, I can also back up the virtual drives and VM as further insurance 4. My VM doesn't have to be the 'SOE' build that we use on all our machines thus freeing me from the corporate tyranny :-) 5. My physical/host machine DOES use the 'SOE' so it reflects what my users have so when I test/debug using that I get the same results as they do (reduces the 'It works for me' syndrome). 6. Right now we have a trainee working with us, and I was able to give him a copy of the VM and he's up and running in 5 minutes (OK, a slight exaggeration) vs a day or two of installing all the bits needed to make him effective I don't have any issues with performance in the VM (as we speak it's running 3 copies of Visual Studio with 3 different solutions open with no problems at all). The host machine is an i7 Dual core 1.8Ghz with 8Gb RAM. Cheers, Iain On 12 March 2015 at 15:20, Tom P <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi > > How do the experienced devs here setup their personal laptops/desktops for > development? Do you just install VS directly on the machine and not worry > about it or use "virtual machines" (just learning these) to isolate the dev > stuff? Any good reasons for the latter or simply do it as a "just in case"? > > -- > Thanks > Tom >
