You won’t find me talking about Visual Studio 2010 very often. The days of me developing ended 9 months into my career with Visual C++ 4.0 or something like that. But this is worth braking the habit.
Visual Studio Lab Management is a killer feature. But not for VS 2010; for Hyper-V! Let’s face it: we IT pro’s wouldn’t mind not seeing or dealing with our colleagues who sit in basements and code into the wee hours of the night. They annoy us with their frequent requests for new development and test machines. It never seems to end! They feel the same way about us. We hold them back by taking too long to give them the machines they want and they never seem to get quite what they need. They’d like to take control and build their own stuff. But there’s no way in hell we’ll let them near a computer room.
The answer: virtualisation and self-service provisioning. The VMM 2008 R2 self service portal is a good start. The private cloud solution, SCVMM SSP 2.0 *take a coffee break to rest my fingers … and I’m back* are a good start. But you know what? Dev’s like to work in a familiar environment such as VS 2010. Plus they tend to want sets of machines at once, rather than one at a time.
VSLM gives them what they want: self service provisioning of a lab environment from within Visual Studio. Microsoft recently released an update to bring this feature to RTM.
You can follow Amit Chatterjee’s blog to learn more.