Update and VS2k5 Installed

wow! it's a been such a long time since I blogged.  Part of it is beging extremely busy and the other being extremely lazy :) 

Anyway, I just finished downloading RTM images of VS2k5 and SS2k5.  In preparation for this I had upgraded my laptop (Toshiba Portege M200) to 2GB RAM and 120GB Hard drive.  I scrubbed it clean, installed WinXP Pro, the bare essentials (Edit Plus, Total Commander, Process Explorer, Zoom+, NetCaptor, FeedDemon).  Then I installed VMWare Workstation.  I allocated 60GB partition for Virtual Machines.   I created a base VM with WinXP pro and the latest windows updates, I had it set up with 1GB RAM and 30GB virtual hard disk.  Then I started spawning new VMs from this.  I created a clone called junk: stays clean and is used for experiments and testing install scripts on a clean machine.   I created another for Office2k3 and VS2k3, this is my main dev VM.  I cloned that one too, for junk expriments.  Now that I downloaded VS2k5 i cloned the base and installed O2k3 + VS2k5 + SS2k5 to create my new 2k5 dev VM.  Everything went very smoothly and the VMs are fast enough for development.

I have a common HD partition called Stuff where I keep all my data files (outlook, OneNote, ...) all VMs have access to this partition through shared folders.  So whichever VM i am using i can access my email, notes and files.  In addition, i used TweakUI to redirect the Shell Folders from the OS VM hard drive to this common partition so anything i save to “My Documents“ ends up shared for all VMs. 

Now I have 10 VMs for a variety of purposes.  Demo VMs (VS6, VS2k3 and VS2k5).  Dev VMs (same), Junk (same) and base.  This will hopefully keep things clean and organized.  I hate running different versions of VS / SS on the same machine, this allows me to completely isolate everything without having to reboot my machine to switch partitions.  I can also play around with new software without impacting my main dev VMs.

Why not use Virtual PC instead?  No reason really, i just like VMWare and have been using it for a while.  Everyone else at the office uses Virtual PC and they like it.  The same process can be followed with either of these products.

Print | posted on Saturday, October 29, 2005 2:41 AM