Developing over VPN connection on a virtual desktop

Question

Other than the possible lag issues, has anyone tried this? What are the pros or cons associated with this?

Answer 1

A lot of times for me it's the limitations of the remote desktop connection, be it VNC or RDP or whatever. For examples:

1. My workstation has two monitors. Remotely viewing my workstation reduces it to one.
2. Lag is tolerable in the IDE, but not with anything image-heavy. Everything from photoshopping to web browsing is done locally, not on the remote machine.
3. Adding to #2, when splitting up tasks between the local and remote machine, there's that extra layer of getting the two to play nice together that adds just a little bit of overhead per task, which adds up to a lot overall. Something as simple as saving a file from the web browser and opening it in the IDE takes more steps.

(I may think of more and add them later.)

All in all, it's fine if the setup can be adjusted properly. In my experience, the companies I've worked for have defined their remote connection capabilities by the needs of someone other than the software developers, and thus leave us with little pet peeves that make the process just slightly more difficult than it needs to be.

Answer 2

Here is my take on it from my experiences

PROS: Single dev environment, only need to license one set of tools (if applicable)

CONS: The lag got the best of me. Typing to only have it show up 1 - 3 seconds later...sometimes, other times works great. In VS, the popup notifications sometimes take forever to display as well. Other cons would include if you have to share your desktop with another employee and possible moving files to/from the dev machine as RDP does not natively allow you to drag/drop files.

Answer 3

same as other posters - lag when using tools that affect screen painting for vstudio (resharper,coderush) is a real problem - some stuff involving the mouse (dragging grid columns) is very difficult to use

I'd add that about every 10-15 times when I go to log back in on the physical workstation at work, it takes the stupid thing about 2 minutes to finally succeed in refreshing the displays