How is your development environment configured?

Question

It is curious to learn how people customize their personal and / or development work environment in terms of:

You have all of your developer tools (e.g. Visual Studio, SSMS, etc.) installed on your main operating system.
Do you use virtual machines to have a separate "clean" development environment, consisting only of the OS and one compiler that you work with? You have multiple OSs in a multi-boot system,
Remote connection to a separate machine with developer tools installed there.

Answer 1

It all depends on the type of assignment I am assuming. Here is my setup:

• The main PC. One on my desk. Everything on it.
• Secondary machine. Launches Vista.
• A bunch of "clean" virtual machines for testing. Usually we support 2 machines of each OS.
• The construction machine. VM without an installed product. Just the source code and some compilers.
• A special server for hosting a server application and database. [Our product is a client-server thing]

[In addition, my primary and sectors also work with the server and the database.]

EDIT: By “clean,” I mean that they only have a fresh OS installed, and nothing more. They are unstable and return to their pure state upon completion of work.

Answer 2

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

I work on a Dell XPS Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz laptop with 4 GB of RAM and 1 external 22-inch widescreen monitor.

I tried and tried to work with VMWare Workstation (mainly, but also with Virtual PC), but I come back again and again after the tedious work and annoying delays in Visual Studio. And I tried every trick with a trick and tuned the book available to me. Looks like he just needs more equipment than mine, or much more patience.

I also tried running 64-bit Ubuntu with a VMWare Worstation server running Vista (vlite'ed) as well as Windows XP (lite), but I found it to be just as annoying.

If you have similar specifications for what I described, I can simply recommend that you don’t go down the VM path unless it is NECESSARY.

Answer 3

I have VMWare network replication on the main servers in my environment, including SQLservers, Web servers, a copy of my dev module and AD servers. I also use VS in my dev block for simple things that don't require such testing.

Answer 4

We use Virtual PC for our development. Beyond VP for our build environment. The reason for this is that we can switch between different projects without wasting time. (for support)

Answer 5

Our current client, we have an ESX server with virtual machines running on it. We access virtual machines through Remote Desktop.

For my style in VS 2008, I use VibrantInk by Rob Conery.

We have a Reflector and all Sysinternal tools available on all virtual machines.

I plan to also have ReSharper on every machine.

The Firefox / Firebug component is installed on each machine.

A web developer for IE7 is also installed on every computer.

Hooray!

Answer 6

I really enjoyed using one virtual machine for each IDE I worked with, but this requires a promising machine. However, my company recently adopted the idea that developers can do "just fine" with devices under $ 500. So my current setup is everything on my only machine.

Answer 7

All my tools are on my local machine. I usually work in MVC thinking.

VMWare is configured on my machine, but it is used only in rare cases for things outside of my machine.

My work is mostly done on a Windows machine using Visual Studio.

Answer 8

I have Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 running on my main machine (Vista: p), and everything I can develop here without cluttering the machine. Feels much more responsive than in a virtual machine. I have a virtual machine for Linux development and several virtual machines for testing. I have never tested the VMWare debugging function (run the debugger on the host and debuggee on the guest), although I can imagine that this would be a good reason for Visual Studio on the host, even if you do not need responsiveness.

Answer 9

I have several IDEs and server products running on my main workstation. I also have a remote access laptop that has all the same critical software so I can develop locally (and not depend on Citrix and Remote Desktop for working with code fixes outside the office).

Answer 10

My main working system

• Linux x64 dual core
• Dual monitor
• Redhat based OS
• Vim, Kdevelop, Eclipse (with Epic and Subclipse).

My system is similar (arch and OS) to our servers, for which I am implementing code. Since I work in a small company with many hats, I tend to open the ssh'd mysql connection in one window, and the vim screen opens on the other side. Throughout the day, I use SSH, VIM, SVN, firefox, and email daily.

Answer 11

I put all the tools and other applications needed to create my code into the version control and wrote make files for all projects to use the version of the tools from the repository, and not what could be in $ PATH. Therefore, when I make a shortcut for release, it includes everything necessary for the assembly and depends on the installation of the machine assembly as little as possible. All I need to do is synchronize with version control and type "make". Unfortunately, this requires cygwin on Windows, but I personally think that a Windows machine is simply unsuitable for development without cygwin, regardless of the background of the build system.

I have simple make files for creating projects containing .mk files for the platform. I do not manually create IDE project files. In several cases (Rowley Crossworks for embedded ARM development, Visual Studio for self-development of Windows-PCs) I automatically generate project files based on my makefiles, as part of the goal of "debugging", and then run the IDE using the generated project. This makes debugging convenient without requiring parallel maintenance of the IDE-specific project file, in addition to my makefile.

Answer 12

I am going to create a new development environment for a new department.

A build environment (supporting both Java development and .Net) will be included to separate VMware machines running on the same physical computer. Both images will use server 2008.

The machines for developers will be desktop computers, most likely with 6 gigabytes, large hard drives, 1 or 2 processors with a dual-core or quad-core processor, 24-inch screens * 2, etc. and with the 2008 server installed. Developer code is compiled into the OS. Desktop computers, because I want developers to be able to use VMware for testing, etc., without spending a lot of time complaining about lack of performance while running two VMwares at the same time :)

I am trying to find out the build environment now. Given Team City, ++. It’s hard to find the right option if you want to support a multi-platform environment without any problems :)

Answer 13

Each developer setting includes a MacBookPro 17 "with a 22-inch LCD screen. Eclipse is our IDE and we use VMWare to host our development database (oracle) under winXP.

Answer 14

Obviously, many of your answers will greatly depend on what development each person makes. Maybe we should classify them? :)

Web development

I am using a virtual machine to run a Linux guest computer with a development web server. I use Notepad ++ on my host for editing (a recent conversion from jEdit) and with disk mapping in VM software (Sun VirtualBox), my dev webserver guest machine has no problems serving ever-changing source files. I also use the Windows XP IE6 VPC image in another virtual machine to check the page in IE6. I use this setting even if I am not developing a complex web application and just working on a static HTML page; there are still some dodgy behavioral differences between a locally open file and a served web page in a number of browsers that make this worthwhile.