We all know the steep hardware requirements for running a MOSS server and none of us have a desktop (let alone a laptop) that meets these specs. Microsoft has received a lot of criticism for not providing a properly integrated development environment for MOSS 2007 which makes it feasible to develop on anything but an actual server.

Not willing to run 2003 Server as my main OS I set about experimenting with Virtual PC 2007 on my Vista Enterprise-equipped laptop.

Charlotte had already created a virtual machine with 2003 Server and MOSS 2007 so I ran all the updates and was ready to test my new MOSS server. Things ran pretty smoothly, especially if I didn't access MOSS through the Virtual PC interface, but rather through a browser on the host machine.

Then I went all the way and installed Visual Studio 2005. Not really expecting great results, I fired VS up for the first time - and no, it wasn't a great user experience.

Remote Desktop to the rescue
My laptop is equipped with 2 gigs of RAM which is fairly commonplace these days and I assigned only 1 gig to the virtual machine. This sounds ridiculous but the server ran at an acceptable speed unless I accessed it through the Virtual PC interface.

Using Visual Studio within Virtual PC was almost painfully slow. Instead I connected to the server with Remote Desktop in full screen mode, and this was much faster. In fact, working with Visual Studio this way was a rather pleasant experience - not lightning fast, but acceptable.

I've only developed a couple of test web parts and deployed them straight to MOSS but it all worked flawlessly. I'm yet to try this with bigger projects but so far I haven't encountered any problems.

Portability
The great thing about setting this up in Virtual PC is how portable it makes the environment. Once I had completed the installation and run the updates I took a copy of the .vhd file (the virtual hard drive, about 8 gigs) and kept it in a safe place for future installations.

In theory I could create the perfect development environment with MOSS and all the tools and documentation installed - then save the .vhd file and use it as a template for all developers in my organisation.

This would make it extremely easy to distribute the development environment to different users with different hardware. Also, transferring an existing development environment from an old to a new PC is a breeze with this setup.

I'd be very interested in hearing about your experiences with this kind of setup and how it fares with large Visual Studio projects. In any case, I'll report back when I've put the system through its paces, so stay tuned.