To VM or Not to VM

With Phippsy this was straight forward, in terms of running in a VM. He was running Linux, and Visual Studio 2008 Express and XNA Game Studio 3.1 runs under Windows. So we decided to use VirtualBox to run the VM for Phippsy. But for me it wasn’t as clear. I am running Windows 7 and can run Visual Studio Professional 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.1 natively. But it was one area we knew might come back to bight us, a common operating environment.

I installed the Windows version of VirtualBox, created the same Windows environment Phippsy has

• Windows XP SP3
• Visual Studio 2008 Express
• XNA Game Studio 3.1
• Microsoft Security Essentials

Why this environment, other than Windows XP, which we both had licences for, the others are free to download. The VM would not be clogged up with too much bloat from miscellaneous programs, but enough to keep the environment secure, and the most important part, they are identical (other than the host operating system). I am sure there are some minor differences under the hood but the code Phippsy runs, will be able to run on mine with no surprises.

Humble beginnings…

We are Michael Rogers and Michael Phipps.  Rogers is a commercial systems analyst located in Melbourne, usually working in Visual Basic, and Phipps is a web developer in Brisbane who usually works with PHP.  We’ve been friends since Year 1 in primary school.

It’s been years since we’ve been able to work on a project together, so Rogers suggested trying to build an xbox 360 game, which would be a challenge to us both since we are not familiar with C# programming for a console.

We’ve decided to record our progress in this blog, both to look back and remember how we’ve handled things, and hopefully as a resource of sorts for people who are building their own games.

Phipps brings another degree of complexity to the project, with Linux (ubuntu) being his native OS, so we will also be walking the trials and tribulations of building games in a virtual machine.

If you are reading this, we hope you find what we talk about useful.  Finally, we hope this isn’t our first and last past.  🙂