testing on Virtual Machines

Once you have the application, or even during the development phase, it's good to test if that application works in verious conditions. 

Windows XP/Vista, 32 bit or 64 bit, with or without Office installed, with Office 2k, XP, 2k3, 2k7, there are a lot o possible environment conditions that can affect the performance of your application.

Let's say you're working with Access 2007 and you use a font like Cambria which looks good on your computer. You'll be surprised to see that on a computer with only Access 2007 Runtime installed, this font might not be available so your interface will look different.

You can only see that if you test the application in a controled environment

Ideally you'd have access to a bunch of computers, each of them with a certain configuration but most of the time that's not the case.

And it's actually not necessary. All you need is a bunch of Virtual Machines. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is free and it's an invaluable tool from this point of view. I've work with it extensively and, although it does require some serious resources, it works great.

My favourite setup is to have a second computer running these virtual machines while I work in source on my development machine.

But of course you can have these virtual machines running on your development PC which makes it easy to drag&drop files there but it does take some resources. If you have this setup, which I used a lot, a second monitor comes in very handy.

Please remember that you do need OS licenses even for the virtual machines, which is probably why MS Virtual PC is free.

Also in certain cases, like testing installation packages over and over on a clean machine, the Undo Disk feature of Virtual PC will come in very handy.

MS Virtual PC is available for download here.

Enjoy!