My main development machine is an OS X laptop, but for years I have run Windows systems (standalone, on a bootcamp volume, or via various virtualization systems), in order to test projects I work on for Windows compatibility. I'd like to get out of the business of maintaining local Windows systems (and cease buying Windows licenses), so today I tried setting up an Amazon EC2 Windows Server 2008 instance with ActivePerl, Cygwin, Strawberry Perl and MSVC++ 2010 Express. Everything went smoothly.

From here, there are a couple options:

Regardless of which path we go down, my own problems are solved: no more maintaining a local Windows box!

However, the AMI path has another advantage: I have some collaborators who do not have easy access to Windows machines but who do have access to EC2, and I can share the AMI with them.

Is there anybody around here who has set up something similar? Any comments or advice?

In reply to Sharing an Amazon AMI Windows test environment by creamygoodness

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