Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

"Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently, and for the same reason." — Eça de Queirós (Portuguese writer) For a couple of months now I’ve tried to install Server 2008 R2 (which only comes in the 64-bit flavor) and Sharepoint2010 on a virtual machine so that I could conveniently study SharePoint without all the extra resources hogging my regular development box. The first thing you learn is that Windows 7 Virtual PC will not handle a 64-bit guest operating system, not even if It’s the x64 version installed on an x64 box. Drats, Microsoft! Then you learn that VMware is somewhat bloated in that it  installs a lot of extra driver-type baggage, so I gave up on that.  And, I still had issues installing Server 2008 R2 on that. Plus it’s not free, although I do know that they do have a “free” Player version, to their credit. And then you learn that “supposedly” you can trick Windows 7 x64 into accepting an installation of SharePoint 2010 – but the fixes a...

I’m starting my studies of Sharepoint and MOSS, so it occurred to me that creating a Microsoft Virtual PC image of Windows Server 2008 along with SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and other useful tools would be a good idea. I’ve used VMWare and it’s great. But for a single developer who just wants a portable image that you can zip up and store on a USB stick, where you don’t need a whole virtualization infrastructure, VPC is ideal. One of the reasons I like it is that VPC doesn’t install a bunch of network drivers and Windows Services like VMWare Workstation or the free VMWare player.  VPC is nearly 100% “Self contained”, and doesn’t install any baggage at all on the host OS. Also, Shawn Wildermuth told me that VPC runs faster, so I took him at his word. The nice thing about all this is that the entire VPC control file and VHD expandable hard disk, with all of the software enumerated above,  7Zips down to just about 3GB – small enough to put on my  $7.99 King...