Earlier this year I wrote about VPC and how good it was, and Peter (geeknoise) among others have blogged about how they use VPC as their primary development environment. At the time when I wrote about VPC last time I had wimped out and didn't use it as my production environment, teaching etc. off it. I only used it for various and sundry beta software.
When i got back from Korea however I decided to bite the bullet and use it full out, and I believe the title says it all! I have now an XP Host, with MS Office, newsgroup reader, IE etc. I do not have any dev tools installed at all!
I then have a base-line Win 2003 server virtual machine (.vhd file) with all peripheral software needed for both production as well as beta. Some of the software installed is: Emacs, .NET Framework 1.1, VB 6, SQL Server 2000 as named instance (not default), WinDbg, SOAP Toolkit, SQLXML, etc. With this setup it is a doodle "re-paving" and installing the software I need either for production or some beta-test.
The only problem I have at the moment (albeit a minor one) is that for some reason, Right-Alt-Enter (change to or from full-screen mode) doesn't work properly. It changes the mode all right but at the same time it screws up the keyboard so it behaves like I keep pressing the Control key. If I change to full screen mode from the menu it works fine. However to change back I need to use Right-Alt-Enter, which causes problems. By accident I came across a "fix": after having used Right-Alt-Enter, if I go into the Virtual PC Console and chooses "Settings" for the particular virtual machine and then just presses "OK" everything is back to normal. Very Bizzare!!
But as I said, it is a minor problem and I'm extremely happy with this setup!