This week I'm attending the second of two developer conferences
on my schedule for this month. I noticed an interesting trend
that I hadn't seen discussed anywhere else before. Nearly every
presenter is using some kind of virtualization technology to give
their talks.
This is a terrific idea -- it's awesome to have a more or less
pristine copy of your development environment that you can put
into cold storage and spin up right before your talk is slated to
begin.
I'm not sure why it's taken until 2007 for this kind of
virtualization to reach a tipping point, although it might have
something to do with the success of Parallels on the Mac -- as
well as the fact that Microsoft released Virtual PC as a free
product last year. (Although I should mention that I overheard
more than one conversation at VSLive two weeks ago from
presenters who were slagging Virtual PC's performance.)
I'd be willing to bet that this trend will work …
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