Get a Windows 11 development environment
developer.microsoft.com
developer.microsoft.com
Likely to be as close to a production Windows environment as possible.
Otherwise you have an approx 1 month trial period. Which is pretty short - 2 months would be better.
I think one month is decent. But I'm pretty sure if it would be 2 months, you'd say 2 months is pretty short (why?), 3 would better (sure, more is better).
1. https://app.vagrantup.com/gusztavvargadr/boxes/windows-11
Feedback - Quit being so cagey about your ARM release. Make them easier to find. Hell, just create an official UTM image while you are at it.
Apple Silicon users will thank you, all at once.
Weird that they would not include ARM version, considering that Visual Studio for ARM is available too.
[1]: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/329311-report-windows-...
They have ARM images available, I run them in UTM already. They just make them increasingly difficult to find.
Obviously the main reason to use this is that you need to make a Windows version of some application and don't natively use Windows as your development/testing environment.
And these have existed for at least a decade. I remember using one in the early 2010s to debug weird issues with IE.
Think any browser, heavy 3d/rendering stuff (Maya, Blender, etc), games/game engines, etc.
Even basic streaming/video/music players (Spotify, VLC or even ffmpeg has a Windows port/build that could have platform specific bugs).
Also even in the case that the application is mostly just an embedded browser window it can still have platform specific bugs.
I would argue the vast majority of native desktop applications are Windows applications just due to its massive marketshare. So in most cases if you are making a native application for desktop you will have to at the very least debug it on Windows sooner or later.
Yeah dude platform-layer stuff would need to be native. But literally all those things are platforms on top of another platform. They're not applications and we're talking about applications.
> Even basic streaming/video/music players (Spotify, VLC or even ffmpeg has a Windows port/build that could have platform specific bugs). Also even in the case that the application is mostly just a an embedded browser window it can still have platform specific bugs.
This is not my experience with non-proprietary streaming services. The only reason those need access to the native environment is for DRM reasons.
> I would argue the vast majority of native desktop applications are Windows applications just due to its massive marketshare. So in most cases if you are making a native application for desktop you will have to at the very least debug it on Windows sooner or later.
This is only due to momentum. I highly doubt this is the future of computing..
Wait what? Since when is stuff like Blender, VLC, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, DaVinci Resolve, etc not applications?
Yes I did list browsers too but they are applications too. Someone has to develop them and fix all the platform specific issues.
> This is not my experience with non-proprietary streaming services. The only reason those need access to the native environment is for DRM reasons.
So basically now you added a modifier "if you develop open source software then just use linux desktop".
> This is only due to momentum. I highly doubt this is the future of computing.
Yeah but for the next 10 to 15 years at least we for sure will have Windows around as the dominant native desktop platform. Or are you saying 2024 is finally the "year of Linux desktop"?
If you think "cross-platform" means "everything will work so consistently that you never even need to test on the most popular desktop platform" then I'm afraid I have some very bad news for you.
I use these VMs all the time - they're a pain if you need a serious development environment, but they're great for quickly testing Windows issues & reproducing customer environments.
With web apps if you want a more native look/feel/need more native integarations and decide to use something like Electron you can still have platform specific issues/bugs.
I think they should just offer an unlocked version of these for like $5 - 10 a month, as long as its in a VM it stays active.
I mean they are literally giving it away for free.
For example, I'm currently using a retail Windows 7 Home Premium ($200) license upgraded to Windows 8 Pro ($100) in 2012 to run Windows 10 (free upgrade) on a fairly recent PC that's fully supported by Windows 11 (another free upgrade whenever I choose to do so).
On the linked page, Microsoft is only giving away an evaluation copy that, per the license terms[1], can't be used "in a live operating environment", which presumably includes ongoing use as a development system.
With that said, a $10/month consumer Windows Pro subscription for VMs and PCs that don't ship with OEM Windows, while niche, would probably net Microsoft at least as much as retail sales to the same market, so you're not wrong.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/UseTerms/Retail/Windows/11/U...
Or is this so that I can spin up boxes for free (no Windows licenses) in my CI pipeline, so long as the build takes less than an hour?
Reinstalling it every couple of months is not much of a problem if you have a provisioning script. I actually like to do it that way because keeps bloat to a minimum.
Edit: now I see that that is the known issue. However, I only hit it in a few places:
- Start menu search - Visual Studio installer - Visual Studio launch screen
It's not really unusable, though; the Start menu issue is just a flicker and the VS issues are simply the wrong text being rendered until you mouse over it. It's a bit annoying, but I am fine with it.
The downloadable VMs don’t even require that your host OS be Windows or that you already have a Windows license, and they’ve been offered since long before Windows Sandbox existed.
It (Sandbox) worked okay for shady car repair handbook .ISO salvaged from the net for a long EOL'd unsupported model. Hope I'm not in a botnet... but I could find the repair instructions :D
Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V ] Ubuntu [ KVM ] Windows [ Hyper-V] (Armageddon/Ragnarök/heat death of universe)What excuse is there for the registry? Why are we stuck with 1980s solutions for 2024 problems? Why is there not simply some directory devoted per-app for configuration? How is this any better than "chaos that is assorted text files on Linux"? Of note—you can edit the linux configuration files with any editor you give a shit about, not just a one-off proprietary tool that obviously sucks ass.
Because one of the key objectives of the Windows Registry is to centralize the chaos induced by programmers being programmers.
Of course, if you bothered to learn how it all works you will know each program gets its own "directory" inside the Registry. Or they should, anyway; programmers gonna be programmers.
>Of note—you can edit the linux configuration files with any editor you give a shit about, not just a one-off proprietary tool that obviously sucks ass.
You can access and modify the Registry using any of: Registry Editor, Powershell, and plain text files imported into or exported from Registry Editor.
>Why are we stuck with 1980s solutions for 2024 problems?
The only people stuck in the 80s are the FOSS neckbeards such as yourself insisting on doing things the One Holy Way(tm), which is plain text files of arbitrary formatting located and accessed in arbitrary fashion.
The Windows Registry mandates a single format and central location and access scheme, which reins in at least some of the programmer chaos.
The issue is the registry. Macs manage configuration without it just fine!
> You can access and modify the Registry using any of: Registry Editor, Powershell, and plain text files imported into or exported from Registry Editor.
Oof. Instant failure.
Please tell me you know nothing about the Windows Registry without telling me you know nothing about the Windows Registry.
In case the snark by itself isn't useful: Windows provides the Registry Editor which, as its name implies, lets you modify the Registry using a GUI.
If you prefer a text-based method, you can modify the Registry by loading in human readable (and editable) .reg plain text files.
Powershell also provides a CLI environment, if that is preferred.
That database is only accessible through one tool. Ok, two since powershell, but they probably call the same API so one single point of failure.
And its correctness cannot be verified - or fixed - if that tool fails.