January 21st Madison .NET Usergroup Meeting

How many times have you said, "It works on my machine..."?  With so many operating systems out there, it's difficult to development an application for only one platform.  So how do you debug and test your app in different environments??  Do you have multiple machines with different operating systems and configurations?  How do you test your application setup on a clean machine?  Does it contain all the required components for a fresh install? 

The solution is virtualization.  Creating and using virtual machines has never been easier.  On a single machine, you can have multiple virtual hard drives to test different operating systems.  If you want to test a clean install of your application, then you can easily make a copy of your virtual machine and test.  If you want to see if your application behaves the same on Windows XP and Windows Vista, then you can test in each environment all on the same machine.

For this presentation I'll be going over the latest examples of virtualization technologies and how you can use them in your development.  I will also be bringing a hard drive share with all the freely available VHDs that Microsoft has available for you to download.  These are made available to all developers to give them test environments for their applications.