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.