Developing via Remote Desktop

Question

Has anybody any successful remarks about having a team working via Remote Desktop?

In many workplaces, we put end users via Citrix and the applications on a central, powerful server. Sometimes the clients are in the same building as the server, but often, they are remote.

There could be some huge benefits for me to put my developers on Windows XP or Vista instances running on a couple servers with Hyper-V.

I'm worried that RDP/RDC via the internet would be too slow for somebody to be able to develop efficiently.

I'm sure I can hear plenty of bad things about it... are there any people out there that have had success?

Answer 1

If you're not worried about the latency on audio and fast-moving imagery and you're not developing anything dependent on 3D hardware, you'll likely be fine.

I've never used it in a team environment, but I use my laptop RDP'd into my workstation all day and love it.

Answer 2

We connect to our development environments using RDP and locally the performance is great. It slows a bit over VPN, but is still acceptably responsive.

Turn off all the windows animation functionality, desktop background, etc. and that will help considerably.

Answer 3

I've worked in an environment where we would occasionally edit some existing code via remote desktop. There were no significant challenges to this. As a developer I positively hated doing that work. Everything felt slow and unresponsive. However, we got the work done.

Thankfully these were often short 3-4 hours jobs... mostly fixes to existing systems on remote customer sites. I don't think I could recommend it as a normal way of doing work, but its certainly possible.

Answer 4

I've used both VNC and RDP over a DSL connection, running through an SSH tunnel, and have had no real issues.

There are definitely some lags, particularly if you're redrawing large parts of a screen. But most development involves small edits, and both of these protocols handle that very well.

Answer 5

I've used it to work from home (remote login to my in-office PC via VPN).

The performance depends on your ISPs, of course.

It's slightly less reliable (because as well as your having downtime when/if ever the office LAN is down, there's now additional risk of downtime while either of the internet connections is down).

Answer 6

I have a remote server on a 1Mbps upstream pipe which I RDP to (over a VPN) and it works just fine. I even use large screen resolutions (1600x1200) with no performance problems. Of course, I'm not sure how such a setup would fare for multiple concurrent users, however.

A benefit of developing over RDP that I hadn't anticipated is that you can save your sessions--so after you get done developing for the day, you quit your RDP client and power down your computer, and when you log back in the following day your session is right where you left it.

As an added bonus, RDP clients are available for linux, and OS X.

Answer 7

What is important for a development workstation is sheer processing power. At our place the developers have the most high-end workstations in terms of cpu, memory, disk, etc and not in terms of audio and graphics. It's the latter that are most affected by RDP.

As long as the server that your developers are RDP-ing to is fast enough to handle multiple compiles, builds at the same time you should be fine.

Answer 8

Pre-2000 I did it for 3 years every day several hours a day. This was when bandwidth sucked too.

Nowadays it's much much better.

And if you use NxMachine life gets even better :)

I did not, however, use the machine with multiple users. My concern with that would be that developers are a finicky bunch (myself included) and we tend to push machines really hard as it is.

Can't imagine several folks on one box all deciding to compile :)

G-Man

Answer 9

We do it with citrix and is very fast.

Answer 10

As with all things, the answer to your question is "Your Milage May Vary" or YMMV. It depends on what the developers are doing. Do they spend most of their time writing code, or do they do a lot of large compiles? Do they need direct hardware access?

Do they need debugging rights? Once you grant them debugging rights, they basically own the machine and can interfere with other users.

It's typically much better to allow the users to develop on their own computers, and use a VPN to allow them to acces the version control system. Then they can checkout the files to their local computers and do whatever they want, then checkin the changes.

But, RDP has it's advantages too. You really need to weigh the pro's and cons and decide which list is longer or more "weighty".

Answer 11

I have seen a situation where the attempt was made to do this with a sattelite office. It was done for a java development team using various java IDE tools. The result wasn't regarded as a success, and the company brought the team back into a central London office at considerable expense.

For someone doing this on a day-in day-out basis on interactive software, the result isn't really very pleasant. For something that mainly uses text-based tools such as vim and unix command line tools, it works somewhat better. At one point I had XVNC going over a 128 Kbit DSL link (of a type that was prevalent in New Zealand at the time) and could do work on an Oracle-based data warehouse at a remote location quite readily. The level of interactivity required by the tooling made them much less sensitive to the slow link than a Windows-based IDE.

So, I'll invoke the 'it depends' argument with some qualifications:

• I would not recommend it for a modern IDE, and certainly not for something heavily graphical like Dreamweaver, BI Development Studio or Informatica.

• For a textual environment like traditional unix development tools it could probably be made to work quite well. These user interfaces are much less sensitive to latency than a direct-manipulation user interface.

I'm something of a believer in the 'best tools' principle. Going out of your way to give a second-rate user interface to a development team will give off negative signals. The cost saving from doing this is likely to be minimal and it will annoy some of your team members. Even if it can be made to work reasonably well you are still making a value statement by doing this. Weigh the cost saving against the cost of replacing one of your key development staff.

Answer 12

I use Remote Desktop to control my Windows machine at work. I use a Parallels VM on a Mac and my connection is 2.5M down, 256k up.

This works really really well. I've been doing this for 2 years for 1-3 days a week. The slow upspeed isn't an issue - I can't type that fast.

I have 3 screens at work but still find a 20" Mac screen to be superior. The colours are much cleaner and I can work longer at the Mac than my work screens!

The thing that is a killer is Flash on a browser. If I accidentally open a browser on my remote machine with Flash it kills the connection. The solution is to use FlashBlock (a firefox addin).

I use Eclipse and Visual Studio with no issues whatsoever.

Answer 13

I use RDP daily for development, I leave my laptop on at home with my work environment open and ready to go. When I get to work and everybody is loading up their projects and opening their programs I just RDP in and I'm ready to go. You have to keep in mind certain keyboard shortcuts that change though (CTRL+ALT+DEL for example), it is annoying at first but you get used to it.

To keep the latency to a minimum, I recommend...

• turning the colors down to 256 (after all, you only need to see text)
• Leave the wallpaper at the other computer
• Leave sounds at the other computer
• Leave any themes on the other computer
• Choose a lower connection speed, even if yours is higher. Windows will minimize the data sent.

One of the advantages you might also consider is processing power. If your machine at home has far better specifications than your workstation on the job, compilation time is improved a fair bit. Since your local machine only needs to update the image from the remote machine, your local computer is not under load.

Using this option also allows me to keep on track. While others log in and browse the internet and waste time, I'm set up and ready to go. Being more productive helps you get paid the big bucks (if your employer notices), while others are still stuck in their junior programming roles.

Answer 14

I wonder what the reason for this would be. Does the central server(s) have access to some resources that the individual developer machines could not access?

I'm using RDP to connect from my home computer to my work computer from time to time. I have to say - it's possible to code, but it's way more comfortable to do it when the IDE is on your own machine. Even when on a 100MBit LAN there is some noticeable lag. Not enough to bother work, but annoying nevertheless.

If the people have to work from remote places on a regular basis, I'd rather prefer a setup where the central source control is available through some secure protocol (HTTPS, VPN, etc.), but the development can happen locally on the developer's machines. If using something like SVN, which works well even with offline development, then it should be way more comfortable for the programmers themselves.

Answer 15

I run a small business that relies heavily on remote desktop software to cut costs. I have been using proxy networks for over a year now and it has worke great so far.