My Development Virtual Machine

A few years ago, I was blessed to win an MSDN subscription, and with it a number of development tools & OSes. Just recently, I started into building a collection of virtual computers for my own software development as well as for use on NAIT projects, so I thought I would take a moment to outline my dev computer’s contents here.

Note: This list is still under development…

• OS – Windows 2003 Server, Standard Edition
  • IIS6
  • .NET Frameworks 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5
• Software
  • SQL Server 2005, Developer Edition + SP2
  • Visual Studio 2008 Team System + SP1
    • SQL Express 2005
    • Free Add-ins:
      • AnkhSVN 2.0
      • Versioning Controlled Build
      • nUnit 2.5
      • Visual Basic Power Packs
      • Silverlight Tools for VS2008 SP1 and Silverlight Toolkit
      • Telerik OpenAccess ORM Express 
      • Alachisoft’s Tier Developer 6.1 ORM & Code Generator (which appears to be utilizing CodeSmith templates!)
    • Purcha$ed Add-ins:
      • Refactor! Pro & CodeRush
      • TypeMock Isolator 5.3
    • ???
      • Microsoft Blend
  • Edit Plus 3
  • CodeSmith Professional 5.0
  • Beyond Compare 3
  • Google Chrome
  • Silverlight 2.0
  • SnagIt 8 (the most recent version is SnagIt 9, which has a lot of improvements!)
  • Windows Live Writer 2009 (installed through the .msi as explained here)
  • WinRar

My overall approach is to use differencing disks, which allows me to have a base from which to create brand-new computers with all my regular software in under 5 minutes! I’m still building my system, but within this week, I’ll have the base VHDs from which to make a number of virtual machines for the different projects I’m working on. The following diagram illustrates my current plan for what computers I’m hoping to set up.