#Xamarin studio windows 7 install#
#Xamarin studio windows 7 software#
#Xamarin studio windows 7 windows 7#

Within that folder I have a Home folder which I use for SVN checkouts, and I also configured SQL Server to use a directory under Shared for all the data storage.

#Xamarin studio windows 7 windows 7#

This is really useful since you can keep a single checkout of all your projects and work on them from different systems! On my regular Windows 7 install, I created a “Shared” folder off the root (OMG not a Library?). When you boot from a VHD, your regular Windows system drive is available as drive D.

#Xamarin studio windows 7 install#

I also decided that since Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2008 run nicely side-by-side that I would go ahead and install Visual Studio 2008 on the base image since I’ll most likely be working primarily with 2008 through the next year. So I installed it to the base installation, along with a few other tools that I use often (and are not really updated regularly). However, I didn’t want to have it setup on each virtual disk. I almost always need a database server to do any sort of distributed application testing, so I wanted to have a SQL Server 2008 available. Next I ran Windows Update, along with installing the Microsoft Security Essentials to have a basic level of virus/malware protection.

#Xamarin studio windows 7 software#

Once I’ve completed all the setup tasks, I’ll set the regular Windows 7 option to be the default when I’m not working with the beta software installations. This will change the name of the boot manager entry for the current machine to “Windows 7 Baseline,” distinguishing it from the normal Windows 7 install. So I quickly opened a command prompt (as Administrator), and typed:īcdedit /set description “Windows 7 Baseline” While waiting for the setup process to complete (which included at least two reboots, both of which properly loaded into the VHD without any issues, so that’s cool), I started working on this blog post.Īfter the install completed, I wanted to make sure I didn’t get confused by the boot manager now having two “Windows 7” options at started. I chose the advanced install option, after which I selected my newly created partition as the installation target and formatted it so the installation could continue.

Once this was finished, I switched back to the setup window and clicked Install Now. Once the setup window appeared, I pressed Shift+F1 to open a command prompt and created a new VHD by typing the commands shown below.Ĭreate vdisk file=”d:vhdsw7base.vhd” type=expandable maximum=80000

The first thing I did was slide the Windows 7 DVD into the drive and rebooted the machine. Since Windows 7 has the ability to boot into a VHD, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try this functionality myself. Since a new beta drops every couple of months (and maybe even an interim release or two in between for those lucky enough to get access to it), I don’t want to have to repave the machine for each new release. The goal of this article is simple: a clean installation of Windows 7 that can be used to test new versions of Visual Studio 2010 until we reach RTM. Leveraging Windows 7 Boot to VHD to Test Visual Studio 2010 2 January, 2010.