What OS do you develop on?

[Richard Carpenter]

I see more and more people using Windows Server for their OS on the
workstation they use for development. Is this pretty common? Aside
from being able to set up just about any server resource you might
need to develop for (SQL Server, SharePoint, IIS, etc.) on your local
machine, what are the other pros and cons? What OS do you use and why?

 

[Hayato Iriumi]

Hello, Richard.
I used to use server OS such as Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server
2003, but I've started to use XP for my development machine for
development.

The reason for that is that it's simply a lighter OS. Although I do do
some testing on my development machine, as the unit test and automated
build system matured, I didn't really see compelling reason to have my
development machine on the server machine.

Most of Microsoft server product provide us with SDK, so I guess that
another good reason why not to have to build your development machine
on a server OS.

After all, I think it's just a matter of preference.

 

[Anders Borum]

Windows Server 2008 - it's a perfect workstation compared to Vista.

 

[Marc Gravell]

I tend to develop on the platform that I am targetting; if I am
writing server code, I'll use Windows Server; if I'm writing client
code I'll use XP/Vista. The reason is that I get fewer surprises when
things work differently, or require different permissions /
configuration changes / additional installs. The easiest way to do
this is with a few virtual machine images; this makes it a breeze to
change between platforms, and if you mess it up, you simply go back to
your master image (i.e. the clean image that reprsents the target
platform).

Marc

 

[Richard Carpenter]

I tend to develop on the platform that I am targetting; if I am
writing server code, I'll use Windows Server; if I'm writing client
code I'll use XP/Vista. The reason is that I get fewer surprises when
things work differently, or require different permissions /
configuration changes / additional installs. The easiest way to do
this is with a few virtual machine images; this makes it a breeze to
change between platforms, and if you mess it up, you simply go back to
your master image (i.e. the clean image that reprsents the target
platform).

That's the approach I've taken to date and exactly the same reasoning.
The client I'm currently developing for uses a Windows workgroup
environment and will be using SQL Server 2005 Express for their data
store, so that's what I'm using for this project. It prevents me from
going down any design paths that the client's environment may not be
able to support.