If there's one thing I've learned lately, after upgrading a few home PC's, it's that getting your environment back to the way it was prior to the hardware upgrade is never fun. If you're a developer, there are a specific set of tools which you are used to using. If you are a professional and spend 8-12 hours a day in Visual Studio, with a certain source control engine, certain code tools, and a certain color scheme, suddenly being without them can be quite jarring.
That's why I feel it's best to virtualize your development environment. Install all the tools you need, and you'll have a portable pc that can travel with you. When you replace your host, the guest can just be copied right over! The best thing is that you can back up the virtual pc & it will only contain the software used in a development context. You can even RDP into the development virtual PC to be "in" the machine.
So I'm completing setting a virtual machine up now. Here's my environment:
1.5 gb ram, virtual machine (Microsoft Virtual Server).
Vista Enterprise Edition (Wanted to make sure I developed under least privilege, and got used to it)
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional
JetBrains Resharper (Code Refactoring / Usability plugin for studio -- a MUST HAVE!)
JetBrains dotTrace (Performance Profiling)
NUnit (Runs unit tests)
TortoiseSVN (Shell client for my VisualSVN subversion server)
VisualSVN Studio Plugin (Connects Studio to my VisualSVN subversion server)
TeamPrise Explorer (A free TFS connector. Used to publish my open source software on CodePlex)
NCover and NCoverExplorer (Unit Test Coverage tools)
TestDriven.NET (Unit Test Runner plugin for NUnit for Visual Studio)
NUnit is open source and free to use, as are VisualSVN server and TortoiseSVN.
TestDriven.NET, NCover, and TeamPrise were all provided for free for open source products. I'd like to thank those publishers again for supporting the community!
Recently, I swapped out the last machine I had on XP, a 5 year old laptop, to Vista. I even got my wife a Vista box, and things went mostly smoothly. Until she came to me one day and said things weren't working.
I dug around for a while, and tried to get into the management console as admin, sure enough a UAC dialog beep sounded, but there was no dialog asking for elevation of privileges. That's when things went crazy -- there was no dialog, but the system was still waiting for input. The screen didn't dim with the protected desktop, and the app that was asking for permission was hung. Alt-Tab worked except for the hung tab -- but no windows/apps could be closed/exited.
I pulled out the standard tricks to combat the situation, all failures, and finally went to safe mode. Even that failed to pull up the dialog. It wasn't drivers, it wasn't registry. Then came the last straw. I restored a backup of the machine from before the problem -- it didn't work!
Gave up for a night, and the next day she mentioned: "Oh, and the date's wrong". So I figure, ok.. i'll just change the date. But you can't because it requires UAC! I was fed up and booted into BIOS to fix the date, laughing -- at least I can fix this, I thought.
The punchline?
Changing the date fixed UAC. The machine was set to a year in the future. The worst part of this is that the PC should not have known it was a year in the future... is Windows phoning home on UAC requests? What's really going on with the time/date settings?