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As you wrote in your original post, it all comes down to discipline. Once I got the hang of it and stuck with my own set of best practices, everything became a no-brainer.
One warning though--spinning up new VMs for different purposes quickly becomes a habit...I original bought that machine with 8GB of RAM, then quickly moved on to 16, then 32, and I'm now wishing that it could handle 64 (this is all consumer grade, off-the-shelf hardware).
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dandy72 wrote: my own set of best practices
Sounds like the makings of an article to me! 
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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The windows world is pretty far behind on that front. With Linux there is vagrant[^] to make managing virtual machines much easier. I'm just starting to get up to speed on it.
For application deployment, there is docker[^], where you can virtualize just the files and apis for a specific application. I haven't started looking into it, just reading up on it right now.
It looks like vagrant added support for windows guest oses with the latest version. https://www.vagrantup.com/blog/feature-preview-vagrant-1-6-windows.html[^]
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very interesting stuff.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Vagrant runs on Windows as well (I have it installed, just haven't worked with it yet.) It looks quite cool, and is written in Ruby.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
---
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
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I used a vagrant setup by a coworker to create an Unbuntu VM to host a rails project I worked on earlier in the year. Other than some startup snafus (mostly caused by a default changing between when my coworker learned it and I installed it for that project) it worked great. Much easier than my trying to config a VM by hand would've been.
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
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It's a very good approach.
I use a virtual machine for Linux building, with the mass of environment variables set up months ago.
It lives on a Windows 7 machine and enables me to exploit limited resources(KVM switches and desk space being rare and costly)with a couple of clicks.
It also allows me to tweak the build environment without breaking any other projects I have on the go.
And of course, imaging the the master file makes it disaster proof.
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I too have been doing this. I was frustrated that I would have to reload my PC every six months or so.
I tried a VM as my main dev machine about a year ago, and the experiment failed. It was way too slow.
I decided to try again a couple of months ago. The main difference this time is that I am using a dedicated SSD drive for my virtual machines.
My host system is a 3-year old i7 with 16GB running Windows 8 Pro. It has all of my portable apps for email, browsers, etc., but almost nothing installed.
I have my main dev VM that includes every conceivable version of VS (I work on a lot of legacy projects), Ghostdoc, resharper and all the other goodies. It uses Hyper-V.
Projects that are big, require isolation or another OS get their own VM. Currently I have a legacy project that is running in a VirtualBox VM with Windows Server 2002 and Visual C++ 6.0.
My comments so far
* Sometimes there is a little lag, but with the VMs on an SSD it is tolerable
* I'm sure I can use multiple monitors with VMs, but I haven't tried. Sometimes it would help.
* When using Hyper-V, connect to the client through RDP, not the Hyper-V application. It's more responsive, and you can cut/paste files between VM and host or even between VMs.
* VirtualBox lets me cut and paste text, but not files.
* VirtualBox has more modes. e.g. Seamless mode is pretty cool.
* In a pinch when I needed to run a second copy of a VirtualBox VM on another host, it worked on my i5 mini-Mac without problems
* Xamarin works fine inside a VM
* You CANNOT run the Windows Phone emulator (which is a Hyper-V VM) inside a VM. (Learned the hard way)
* I'd like to try FreeBSD (my preferred OS) as the host, haven't tried yet.
* OSX will run inside a VM, not for the faint of heart
* Another recent project required interfacing with a PciE Digital I/O board, which can't be accessed from VM.
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I work for a consulting firm and when I can do development on my employer's laptop rather than using a client provided device, I always spin up a VM and install any required software. I often have to use client-specific VPN software, and running it in a VPN keeps it off my employer's machine. It also makes clean up easy after I complete a project.
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I use a few virtual machines as well. Nothing fancy, just a few for other systems running under my Arch x86_64 host.
I found it's also possible to clone the VMs to a raw image, then dd them to a real external drive to run on real hardware. For Windows, you'd do something along the lines of
VBoxManager --format raw <whatever_image.vdi> <destination.raw>
Don't know what you'd do to copy that to a physical drive  not a big Windows fan.
Whoever created the Undo button is a genius.
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Give KVM a try. At least that's what the "big boys" use in their data centers. In *buntu, apt-get install virt-manager and add your old machines to it. You will find that, with the virtio drivers and raw disk images, no cache and native threads, and a bit more ram, windows will run faster in the VM than on bare metal. This is because the kvm hypervisor does a good job on caching hot disk chunks in spare ram automagically. However you loose on the desktop integration side.
As for backwards compatibility, there are other goodies you can find in the linux world. My uncle for example has to run some visualFox 6 and FoxPRO 2 ( good ol' msdos) apps and the hardware he was using is dying out. Windows 7 and up, completely ripped out the COM/OLE 16 bit compatibility layer thus making it impossible to just purchase hardware with a win sticker and run your tools. We ended up using DosBox and wine on a linux box with the old Microsoft OLE/COMs extracted from a windows 98 CD. It runs perfectly.
As to why they still use it, well, one can not simply upgrade a county's retirement fund software to the latest and greatest )
http://virt-manager.org/[^]
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Poor, poor man...
I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is. (V)
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Yeah with all the fuss it would have been easy to slip out. Funny!
New version: WinHeist Version 2.1.0 Beta
Have you ever just looked at someone and knew the wheel was turning but the hamster was dead?
Trying to understand the behavior of some people is like trying to smell the color 9.
I'm not crazy, my reality is just different than yours!
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Who were those people and why were they messing with that person?
I don't watch many TED talks.
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It was just some performance art.
The speaker was in on it.
_____________________________
A logician deducts the truth.
A detective inducts the truth.
A journalist abducts the truth.
Give a man a mug, he drinks for a day. Teach a man to mug...
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ok thanks, I was just wondering.
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What would you do if air-conditioning was off on a hot day at office?
I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is. (V)
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I suppose 'get naked' isn't an option...
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NSFW 
I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is. (V)
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: What would you do if air-conditioning was off on a hot day at office?
That's what Starbucks is for, or some coffeehouse equivalent. 
Marc
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Continue working ?
I'd rather be phishing!
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Bzzzzzz - Wrong answer!
I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is. (V)
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Not be there. (This is Phoenix.)
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I think I would have just gone to the bar when all the morphsuits came out.
