As some of you may know, I’ve been doing all my development 100% on a MacBook Pro, running VMware Fusion, running Windows Server 2008.  Recently my install of visual studio started acting up (not due to the laptop or VMware) but because of a bad install. 

Being the bad developer, I didn’t snapshot my image,  so now I’m going through the process of creating a new image.  And as I’m going through this process, I’m starting to realize I’m installing less and less on my dev machines.

So here is a list of software I needed:

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008
• Microsoft Office 2007
• IIS7

That’s all I need on a daily basis.  The install has a small footprint and runs a lot quicker.  I’m starting to believe, setting up multiple VM with only the minimum required software on each machine is the way to go.  This allows me to turn on an off VM’s as I need them.  The machine can allocate 100% of its dedicated resource when it’s on and free it up once its off.