Virtual PC 2007 and Team Build

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Virtual PC 2007 released earlier this week, in case you didn’t know, virtual PC and virtual server are now free downloads.
To download virtual PC 2007 followed this link:
  https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en

For more information about virtual PC follow this link:
  https://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

I have talked to several organisations about using team build to not just compile and test code, but to extend their build scripts to build a full virtualized installation of their application.  This means that when the developers arrive in the morning, they don’t have to spend time installing the latest build, they can quickly (depending on network speed :-) pull down a pre-built installation of their application.  Building a virtualized environment is also a compelling way to expose your application to anyone doing UAT.  Again you can extend TFS to automatically build a Virtual server UAT environment; if you were to catch the build quality changed notification you could kick off a build script to build this UAT environment and to automatically Email all your user acceptance testers that there is a new version of the application and the URL that they should connect to begin testing.

Microsoft Services in the UK have released an extensive library of build tasks that they use intently on a complex projects.  This library includes tasks to work with virtual machines, configure IIS, deployed BizTalk Solutions, and a whole lot more.  If you are interested in building virtualized environment as part of your automated build then you probably have to look no further than this library – and the build tasks that come with DBPro.
For more details follow this link:
 [UPDATED] : https://www.codeplex.com/sdctasks

And On a related note the SQL server team announced that that they were changing their licensing model with regards to a virtualized environment.

For more information see:
  https://blogs.msdn.com/volkerw/archive/2007/02/20/sql-server-2005-sp2-is-available.aspx

And for the fine detail see:
  https://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/virtualization.mspx

Neil.

UPDATE: The build tasks have now moved from GotDotNet to CodePlex (https://www.codeplex.com/sdctasks)