Dirty Hands Make Happy Faces!

Ahh, I don't know what it is about getting your hands dirty that makes you feel gewd!

And no, I'm not dumping my bank in favour of my backyard, I'm getting back to what makes sense! What feels good! What is just my god given right!

I'M BUILDING VPC's! (I wish I had a pocket Dugie though, I reckon I'm not getting the most out of Virtual PC/Server)

Part of what I loved about my old job at DiData, and what I really missed as a Developer Evangelist, was building a brand new, shiny VPC from scratch, putting all the new shiny bits on it, like BizTalk 2006, Sharepoint 2007, SQL Server 2005, and getting it ready for whatever.

Well this time its CRM 3.0. I'm not sure how other work, but I use the stock standard approach of building "Dave's Special Flavour Platform Base", which is pretty much everything you need for all our server products, then I create product flavours, like a TFS flavour. Then I keep adding on top, so for my CRM 3 VPC, I'll have BizTalk, SharePoint, SQL Server, TFS and CRM.

Huh? Where's the Visual Studio?? I never install that on a VPC. It's different if you are just doing rub demos, but when you're doing PoCs or dealing with developers who are using platform bits daily, you need to run it like every day. So I set it up my VPC's as if they were live servers, and make sure I can connect to them, and deploy my code that I've written on my laptop to the VPC like in real life. It ensures there are no smoke and mirrors for the customer developers, and that any security/network gremlins are identified.

Anyhoo, will put up a set of webcasts on C9 as soon as I get my WCF to CRM demo working :)

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2007
  grins You should indulge you inner geek more often Davo!!  :) Make sure you blog back and let us know how your VPC building goes.  Spare no gory details.