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Developer Sandbox I

Wednesday, October 17, 2007 9:18:40 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)
While working on a number of different projects in the past few years I found myself quite often in a situation where my PC would just not start up anymore. For a simple reason: I had installed a number of development IDE’s, server products, and libraries that the corporate software management tool got confused and destroyed my box from the inside. I was in a dilemma. I had to maintain the corporate standard for mainly administrative reporting tasks, as well as for developing on customer projects. Nowadays technology consultants must also work on site and thus carry their development environment. Luckily, the company I work with provided me with a modest but strong enough notebook. Equipped with a 1.8GHz CPU and 2GB RAM I started sandboxing my development environment using VMWare and VirtualPC.
I was able to simulate my customers IT landscape simply on my notebook. Of course performance was low but never an issue. When working with a team, I only had to make sure I could connect to the central source code repository. When working on a piece of code I barely used more than a text editor, the compiler, and a unit test runner at the same time. It didn’t use much resources of my virtualized development environment. And in the event of a complete system crash, I had the environment restored in minutes from a copy on an external USB hard drive.
So that’s why I recommend to sandbox your development environment. It can save, and speak for myself here, a lot of time and spare you the hassle of restaging your system after a complete crash.
By the way, an extra attached screen is heaven, because now you have some space to place your internet browser for library research. And if you need some extra MB’s of RAM, just close Outlook or Notes.

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