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I wanted to stand up a Win8.1 VM on my laptop so I could spend a few hours over xmas break playing around with some of the new features in VS2015 with a real codebase that I know well. (AKA the one I normally get paid to work on.)

In order to have direct access to source control and to avoid potential grounds for contention with corporate IT; instead of Just Doing It (tm) with an MSDN key, I filed a formal request through the support system. They finally got back to me today. Their current MS site license costs them extra for local VMs and trumps the otherwise free nature of my cache of MSDN keys so I'm not allowed to use one of them. D'Oh! | :doh:

Instead, they've offered to give me a loaner laptop I can put the VS 2015 beta on and not have to worry about bricking the OS when it goes RTM. Because nothing says Merry Christmas like dragging home a bag containing two laptops. Mad | :mad:

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Dan Neely wrote:
spend a few hours over xmas break playing around with some of the new features in VS2015

You're doing it wrong.

Jeremy Falcon

I'm not touching a computer over my Christmas break...all of one day off. Smile | :)

Amen brother, and at least you're rocking it right.

Jeremy Falcon

I fully agree the situation is elephanted; but I need a lever to overcome "but VS 2010 still supports the version of .net our customer uses and we'd have to buy new re#er licenses if we upgrade to a new version". Assuming it does half of what it promises, the new feature added to the latest 2015 preview that will generate a complete set of working unit tests for an existing project combined with the number of minor regressions the customer demanded IA tail chasing created that we didn't discover until the pound on the keyboard test, will probably give me that lever. The ongoing maintenance budget is far too small to retroactively write a test suite for the entire legacy codebase manually; and I have every reason to suspect another round of IA tail chasing to produce a fresh stream of petty changes that will cause random edge case problems in strongly coupled code (again no money to redesign) that won't be found out until the acceptance test. (We do have a very exhaustive, and resultantly time-consuming and expensive one of them.)

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Oh, we'll if it's to prove somebody wrong, then rock on man! Laugh | :laugh:

Jeremy Falcon

Basically I need to sell it to my PM well enough to get his support in battling the bean counters. Sigh | :sigh:

If I can get a win8.X VM there're a few things I'd also like to try; just to see what happens. The odds of my being asked to port a WinForm app to either Metro or WP8 are very slim this side of changing employers; but I'm still curious to see how much I'd need to hack at backend code to make legacy non-UI libraries compatible. Hello WinForms would be useless for this; and InsertRandomFossWinFormAppHere would suffer from my not understanding what the backend code does or how it does what it does. Spending an hour or two chasing compiler errors in a codebase I know well would be much more informative; but again that requires a level of co-operation with my current employer.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Sounds like you need a few tips from Simon Travaglia!

Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.

I noticed that some of the features in VS2015 are from Resharper, i.e. remove unused variables or using statements.

Couldn't you have put Windows 10 preview onto a VM with VS2015 and then not have had to worry about license costs?

IF they didn't support (and hence didn't allow on their network) Win8 a year after release, and the person I talked to had to get back to me on if they've gotten around to supporting it since then; I'm certain that they'd ban a win10 VM from their network. And since I made the mistake of trying to things the right way I can't do it on my own and then claim ignorance if/when I get caught. Sigh | :sigh:

The same goes 100x over for copying a work codebase onto a personally owned computer that I could otherwise use as a testbase.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

Ah I see, makes sense.

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