As an Apple user, when I’m doing Domino development I live in VMWare Fusion to emulate Windows. And since the release of the Windows 7 Release Candidate (free until next year) doing testing in IE6 and IE7 is nigh on impossible. There are tools that you can use to emulate the different browsers (such as IETester) but I have found them to be unreliable.
It’s a little know fact that Microsoft actually give out free copies of Virtual PCs setup for IE6 and IE7 compliance testing from their website. Of course because it’s a virtual PC image and not a VMWare image we have to go a little further and convert the one to the other. That’s where these instructions come in. You’ll need to download a conversion tool, the one that worked for me was Q which is actually mentioned in the comments rather than the main body.
Once you’ve done the conversion, you end up with small (i.e. <1gb) Virtual Machines that you can do “proper” IE testing in until you get the nerve to tell you’re idiot IE users that they need to move into the 21st century and start using one of the proper browsers.
Anyway, what it does mean is that you can leave XP and IE6 behind altogether except for your testing which can only be a good thing. Windows 7 really is a big step forwards, even for those of us who don’t even like Windows.
Thanks for posting this Matt; investigating the VMs was on my "to do" list after our sober discussion earlier.
Thanks for the tip, Matt. Now, If could only find a way to have a MAC OS in a VM so I can test stuff… I’m willing to buy the MAC OS, and I’ve seen people blog how but it still seems scary and more complex than just buying a Mac – which I;m not ready to do at this time.
It is a shame there is no MAC support for VMware, As only having access to microsoft computer makes testing hard work,
How have you found running windows 7 on VMware as just about to start testing?
@Eric and @Matthew – you may want to do a Google for Hackintosh on VMWare and be pleasantly surprised 😉
@Matthew – with regards to Windows 7, it’s a huge leap forwards from XP, runs absolutely fine in a VM and is much more OS X like. THough I won’t be switching back to MS any time soon, it is a much more pleasant place to be.