How is your Development Environment Set up?

Question

Curious to know how people set up their personal and/or work development environment, in terms of:

Do you just have all of your developer tools (for example Visual Studio, SSMS, etc.) installed on your main operating system;
Do you use Virtual Machines to have a separate "clean" dev environment that consists only of the OS and one compiler you're working with;
Do you have multiple OS's in a multi-boot system;
Do you remote connect to a separate machine with your developer tools installed on there

Answer 1

It all depends on the type of the job i guess. Here is how my setup is:

1. The main PC. The one on my desk. Has everything on it.
2. The secondary machine. Runs Vista.
3. A bunch of "Clean" VMs for testing. Typically 2 machines of each OS we support.
4. A build machine. VM with no installed product. Just source code and some compilers.
5. A dedicated "Server" to host the server app and the DB. [Our product is a client-server thingy]

[On top of that, my primary and sec machines have the server and DB running too.]

EDIT: By "clean" i mean that they only have a freshly installed OS on them, nothing else. These are non-persistent and go back to clean state on shutdown.

Answer 2

I am running what I think is a fairly standard Agile C# development environment. Vista SP1, Visual Studio 2008 with Resharper 4.1, SQL Express 2008, Subversion server, command line svn client and Cruise Enterprise (unbelievable product) with 1 server and 1 agent for continuous integration.

I am running on a Dell XPS core 2 duo 2.4Ghz laptop with 4GB of RAM and 1 external 22" widescreen monitor.

I have tried and tried and persisted with VMWare Workstation (mostly but also Virtual PC) but I again and again resort back after tiring with the performance and annoying delays in Visual Studio. And I have tried every performance trick and tweak in the book available to me. It apparently just needs either more hardware than I have or far more patience.

I have also tried running 64bit Ubuntu with VMWare Worstation server running Vista (vlite'ed) and also windows XP (lite), but I found it just as annoying.

If you have similar specs to what I described then I can simply recommend not going down the VM path, unless it is ABSOLUTELY necessary.