I use VMWare Workstation Pro 15.5.7 installed on a Windows 10 laptop (host) to run Windows 10 virtual machines (guests).
The laptop has git and some other tools to maintain source code repositories, while all development tools (IDE, compiler, etc...) are installed on the guest VMs.
To access the source files I use VMWare Shared Folders feature. Everything works almost fine in terms of I/O performance, even if a little slower than Windows native sharing (SMB), which by the way is disabled by company policy restrictions.
However, when a file on the shared folder is updated inside the guest, the directory update notification is not sent to all open applications on the guest itself. The result is that, as an example, if you have a file open in your source editor (say Notepad++), the application does not detect the file change. This leads to some unexpected behaviors when using IDE or other tools with code syntax features and/or other "live" features while coding.
Also the same happens when you modify a file or folder from the host.
In both situations the only way is to force a folder update (example refreshing files with F5 key).
This seems to be related to a missing feature as stated here by one of the VMWare developers.
I would like to know if the same issue is currently present on the latest release VMWare Workstation Pro 17. Alternatively, is there a workaround for this? Am I missing some additional driver or tool? (I have VMWare Guest tools installed).
Here you can see my question on the VMWare official forum.
Related
We are going to be switching to Sitecore for our CMS and my team uses Macs. We have no .net, c# experience but are excited to learn. I understand Microsoft recently released Visual Studio Code to work on Mac, and I've looked into Xamarin. Can someone provide any tips for a Mac guy?
Visual Studio for Mac will not help you because Sitecore quite tightly relates on windows features like IIS and windows filesystem with drives and paths; also the rest of cross-platform ASP.NET 5 features (like owin etc.) are not yet supported by Sitecore.
At the moment the best way to work with Sitecore on Mac is virtualisation and in particular - Parallels Desktop for Mac. I am using that myself for last 3 years - that is the most convenient way. Parallels Desktop is a virtual machine solution that integrates your Windows VM very tightly into Mac, you can run multiple (let's say 2-4) Windows virtual machines at the same time (nice to test Content Management / Content Delivery distributed between separate "machines" just on one Mac) - they are all connected to each other and Mac by a "network". Also you will need to have an instance of SQL server (in that case you may allocate a separate VM or simply reference an external SQL server).
Parallels Desktop has a mode called Coherence, when in fact win and mac environments are sort of merged into each other, so you can for example drag-drop from Finder into Windows Exploreк like you do it natively, and get Windows start button at you Dock and many other great features.
However I prefer to run Parallels in a full screen mode on a second monitor to be 1-to-1 like a regular Windows machine. By setting hosts file on Mac machine I can run CMS and hosted websites right from Safari on Mac.
Also virtual machines are stored as folders on your hard drive, so you can easily backup your current state of OS as easy as just archiving that folder, and later revert to that moments you have "saved" - very helpful to experiment, especially if you are a beginner in Sitecore, so you'd not afraid to break anything accidentally.
Good place to start: official website, as well as quickly investigate all its magic on YouTube reviews.
P.S. of course, you may use any alternative virtualisation software, like VmWare etc.
I use Visual Studio for Mac to build my Sitecore solutions. We use a gulp task based on the one that comes with Habitat to deploy changes to files (binaries, views, config, etc...) into a Windows virtual machine running in Parallels on my Mac.
There have only been two things I am missing from Visual Studio on Windows - debugging and Sitecore Rocks.
If you can live without those two things you can definitely develop your Sitecore solutions from a Mac with Sitecore running in Windows.
Would anyone know how one may go about installing Qt SDK 1.2.1 package on a flash drive for plug and play anywhere? If I wanted to do it for Windows would I simply install it from the installer package? Is this even possible?
Update:
Answered below for three OS's.
Windows
You may install Qt SDK 1.2.1 to run on the assigned drive letter of the flash USB at the time of installation.
However, to answer the question there is no way to set the Qt Creator settings to dynamically change drive destination resources for plug and play. If you wish to load Qt Creator on a foreign system the USB drive must be assigned the drive letter assigned at its installation.
Unix / Linux
UNIX and Linux systems reportedly have methods of achieving dynamic drive path assignments for USB applications.
Mac
Unknown. Stay tuned or supply a answer please.
I do remember reading the macs had their own mini OS just for applications to run solely on flash drives. I want to confirm before I say for sure.
Installing the Qt SDK on the flash drive device ? Yes.
With VMWare Workstation Easy Install you can install an OS without any input. How does it do this? Is the support for this built into the OS, or does vmware do some magic to automatically select the correct options?
The support is built into the OS. For example, in the case of Windows guests, VMware generates a floppy disk image containing a txtsetup.oem and some other files used for Windows' unattended-installation feature.
For a bit of further information:
The easy setup leverages the existing unattended setup technologies present in given OS distributions.
In the case of Windows it does the above. In the case of most Linux distributions it would do a kickstart file (or the distribution equivalent if it's supported) based on the information you provide during the setup wizard in VMware.
Most OSes (most, not all) provide some method for unattended setups. A lot of this is the byproduct of no one wanting the prospect of having to manually install multiple machines. You can look here for more information on kickstart files used in RPM distributions of Linux and here for more information on unattended installations of Windows
I want to know that is it possible to create a fully portable virtual machine using any of the VMWare like products? My objective is to create a virtual machine (XP as guest OS), install some app in it, put the vm in a usb2 drive (performance is not a matter), and run it in any windows os (xp, vista, 7) without installing anything in host, using any host account (admin, guest, limited).
Is it possible to do that using any vmware like product? If possible then which one is my best bet?
Can't be done if you want to take advantage of Hardware assisted virtualization. Basically you need admin rights in order to access all the nifty features that make modern, hardware assisted virtualization so fast.
QEMU can run in a few different modes. When run as an emulator the processor is replicated in software, so hardware assisted virtualization is not necessary. This emulation is slow, but very useful if you're developing for embedded hardware that is different than your main PC.
Do you absolutely need to run the VM on top of Windows? If not, and if re-booting the hardware is allowed, you may be able to install a bootable OS on the USB drive. Boot straight from USB when you're elsewhere, and use the VM tool of your choice to boot from USB when you're back at your desktop (I know VMware and QEMU let you access a raw device).
You may also consider a bootable CD to get to a VM environment, then access the VM on the USB. I know there are CDs that will provide KVM or QEMU (I think Knoppix has it); I've not sure about booting to a VMware Server/Workstation environment.
Vmware ACE.
Specifically Pocket ACE. You'll need vmware Workstation to create the package. Check out the youtube video on how to do it. :D
[EDIT] Ace does not fit the requirement of having no Admin rights on the box.
Might want to Moka5. They supposedly support limited accounts, although they also mention requiring administrator access to install.
Vmware Thinapp will allow you to virtualize your app without having to go through the hassle of creating and running a whole VM. Here's another how-to video.
thindownload.com has a bunch of thinstalled apps if you want to try it out.
I'm trying to set up a good development environment for a Django project that I will be working on from two different physical locations. I have two Mac machines, one at home and one at work that I do most of my development on. I currently host a Ubuntu virtual machine on one of the machines to host the Django environemnt, install DropBox on it, and edit source code from my Mac. When I save the code file, the changes get synced over DropBox to the Ubuntu VM and the Django development server automatically restarts because of the change. This method has worked well in the past, but I am starting to use DropBox for a lot of other things now and don't want all of that to be downloaded on every virtual machine I use. Plus, I want to start using Eclipse + PyDev to be able to debug code and have code completion. Currently, I use TextEdit which is great, but doesn't support debugging or completion.
So what are my options? I thought about setting up a Parallels VM on a thumb drive that has my entire environment on it (Eclipse included), but that has its own problems. Any other thoughts?
Here is the environment I set up and it has the components you are after. I have used pydev as well and it works but I prefer Komodo.
Things which I think you are missing:
An SCM - Using Dropbox works but there are some real shortcomings by not using a real version control system. Examples include reverting changes, branching, merging, etc. I agree with Simon
Using a virtualenv will really help when developing on multiple platforms.
I do ALL of this on my Mac:)
HTH