I attended the San Diego .NET Developer Group on Tuesday. Nick Pearce gave a great presentation on how to use virtual machines as a developer. I jotted down a few notes on topics he and others mentioned.
Virtualization
Some random notes:
- Nick is moving from Virutal PC to VMWare for the dual-monitor support.
- Remember to turn on hardware virtualization support in your computer's BIOS. Some (like my Thinkpad) disable that by default.
- A quad-core processor might help performance with multiple virtual machines.
- Use a separate disk drive for a differencing volume to reduce contention.
- You can clone a PC image, but use SysPrep or (XP only) NewSID to fix the SID in the clone.
Source Control
Several products were mentioned: SourceGear Vault, PerForce, Subversion.
Bug Tracking
More products here: FogBugz (integrates wtih PerForce), Trac, BugTrac, Mingle.