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

I have a VMWare network replication of the main servers in my environment including SQLservers, Web-Servers, a copy of my dev box, and AD Servers. I also use VS on my dev box for simple things that don't need as much testing.

Answer 2

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 3

We use Virtual PC's for our development. As well as a VP for our build environment. The reason for this is so that we can switch between different projects without losing time. (for Support)

Answer 4

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

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

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

I'm planning to have ReSharper on every machine also.

Firefox/Firebug combo is installed on every machine.

Web Developer for IE7 is also installed on every machine.

Cheers!

Answer 5

I really enjoyed using a single VM for each IDE I worked with, but that requires a beefy machine. However, my company has taken recently to the idea that the developers can do "just fine" with sub $500 machines. Thus, my current setup is everything on my only machine.

Answer 6

All of my tools are on my local machine. I generally work within the MVC mindset.

VMWare is set up on my machine, but it's only used on rare occasion for things beyond the control of my machine.

My work is primarily done on a windows machine, with Visual Studio.

Answer 7

I have Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 running on my main machine (Vista :p), and everything I can develop here without cluttering the machine, I do. Feels so much more responsive than in a VM. I have a VM for Linux-based development and several VMs for testing purposes. I never tested VMWare's debugging feature (run the debugger on the host and the debuggee on the guest), though I can imagine that that would be a good reason to have Visual Studio on the host, even if you don't care about responsiveness.

Answer 8

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

Answer 9

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.

Answer 10

My main work 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, which is what I implement code for. Since I work for a small company with many hats, I tend to have a ssh'd mysql connection open in one window, with a vim screen open on the other side. Throughout the day I use SSH, VIM, SVN, firefox, and e-mail daily.

Answer 11

I put all toolchains and other apps needed to build my code into revision control, and write makefiles for all projects such that the version of the tools from the repository is used, not whatever may be in the $PATH. So when I do a label for a release, it includes everything needed to do the build, and depends on build machine setup as little as possible. All I need to do is sync to revision control, and type 'make'. Unfortunately this does require having cygwin installed on Windows, but personally, I consider a Windows machine just about unusable for development without cygwin, regardless of the prerequisites of the build system.

I have simple makefiles to build projects that include platform-specific .mk files. I don't manually create IDE project files. In a couple cases (Rowley Crossworks for embedded ARM development, Visual Studio for self-hosted windows PC development), I auto-generate project files based on my makefiles, as part of the "make debug" target, and then launch the IDE with the generated project. This makes debugging convenient, without requiring parallel maintenance of a IDE-specific project file in addition to my makefile.

Answer 12

I am about to set up a new development environment for a new department.

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

Developer machines will be desktop computers, most likely qith 6 gig ram, big harddrives, 1 or 2 cpu's with dual or quad core, 24" screens * 2, etc., and with 2008 server installed. This to ensure that the developer code is compiled on the OS. Desktops because I want the developers to be able to use VMware to test, etc., without spending to much time complaining about lack of performance with 2 VMwares running at the same time :)

I am trying to figure out the build environment now. Considering Team City, ++. Difficult to find the right one when you want to support multi-platform environment without to much fuss :)

Answer 13

Every developper setup includes a MacBookPro 17" with a 22" lcd screen. Eclipse is our IDE, and we use VMWare to host our developpement database (oracle) under winXP.

Answer 14

Obviously a lot of your answers are going to depend heavily on what kind of development each person does. Maybe we should be categorizing these? :)

Web Development

I use a VM to run a Linux guest with a development webserver. I use Notepad++ on my host for editing (recent convert from jEdit), and with drive mapping in the VM software (Sun's VirtualBox), my dev webserver guest machine has no problem serving up the ever-changing source files. I also use the Windows XP IE6 VPC image in another VM to test the page in IE6. I use this setup even if I'm not developing a complicated web-app and am simply working on a static HTML page; there are still some quirky differences in behavior between a locally opened file and a served webpage in a number of browsers that make this worthwhile.