Portable Developer Environment
on 01.21.06, 10:22am in software • comments (5)
After my ranting the other day about "Visual Studio Live", I’ve started to investigate what it would take to put together a small C++/Win32 development environment. I took a quick look at Source Insight and SlickEdit, but still like the ‘editor’ in Visual Studio (with the great Visual Assist) the best (perhaps its what I’m used to).
One thing that I thought I would experiment with is trying to get it to run off a portable USB drive or flash keychain. Unfortunately, even the express versions of Visual Studio heavily relies on the registry, which makes that basically a non-starter. Source Insight also seemed to put it’s claws into the registry, with SlickEdit being the only editor that was "portable".
Of course, this isn’t too big of a deal (as I usually have my laptop around), but having a full coding and debugging environment on a portable usb drive or keychain could be an interesting challenge.
Anyone using any alternatives to Visual Studio that are interesting?
Sean McLeod (January 21, 2006 @ 12:15 pm)
Vista is introducing support for a virtualised registry. So you may be able to set up software on a USB key that writes to a virtualised registry so no other software on the PC is impacted by the registry changes.
Steve (January 21, 2006 @ 1:03 pm)
See, you learn something new about Vista every day. Do you have any other info about this?
Funny, since I’m on the Vista team, and had no idea….
Sean McLeod (January 21, 2006 @ 9:33 pm)
Since I’m not on the Vista team only brief snippets I’ve seen mentioning it
The context in which I’ve seen it mentioned is the case where an app running under a non-administrator account tries to read/write to HKLM instead of HKCU etc. So for app compat and LUA (Limited User Account) situations Vista virtualises the registry for the app.
Since I haven’t seend any real documentation on it I’m not sure if this virtualisation is available via an API or only hard-baked in for app compat with LUA.
If you do find out I’d be interested to know.
For example:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/evaluate/overvw.mspx
Cheers
Dan Palmer (March 23, 2007 @ 9:32 am)
If anyone has had any luck with this, please tell me!!! I really need a portable coding environment, and I use Visual Studio at the moment, but I cannot take it with me. Is it possible to use NSI coding to remove the registry aspect of it??? I have seen it doen with programs such as Skype, but that is obviously on a much smaller scale.
Thanks
Keff (June 12, 2007 @ 9:46 am)
Have a look at Thinstall - it allows you to take an application and make one exe of it, which consists of image of an app, and wrapper which virtualizes registry and filesystem calls (so that it writes into it’s local embeded registry).
I tried virtualizing VS but the problem was that i did the thinstalling on virtual machine with clean winXP (its always better to do it on clean install), and it install different files on XP and Vista, so when I later run that virtualized VS on Vista, id crashed after loading.
But I think you should be OK if you stick to one OS (even things like Office 2007 work OK virtualized).