3 ms·

I do something a bit different: I have a Surface Pro, which is OK in its own right. But I don’t develop straight on it. Instead, I spin up a VM on Azure with

I do something a bit different: I have a Surface Pro, which is OK in its own right. But I don’t develop straight on it. Instead, I spin up a VM on Azure with all my dev tools. I use RDCMan as a RDP client to connect to that, and code there. When at home or office, I dock the surface and have 2 big screens and a nice keyboard. When at a coffee shop, I just use the Surface as-is. If I upgrade my laptop or decide to use my MacBook etc, I just use that to remote into the dev VM instead. My dev environment is agnostic to the screen I use to connect to it. I’ve been doing this 5+ years and wouldn’t go back. I will say I’m more productive with 2 screens, but I routinely worked from coffee shop just fine.

juusto 7y ago
That sounds like a great idea, could you please elaborate further? Which instance and pricing are you using? My use case is media work when abroad. So 16Gb RAM, as much disk space as possible, around 8h a day.
- shireboy 7y ago
  I have an MSDN subscription which gets me ~200/mo Azure Credit, I think. I use the F4 instance which is 4 core/8GB. I set it in azure to shut down around 10pm, and get an email asking me if I want to extend it. Doing this, I have a few bucks to spare on my credit each month for Azure App Service, etc. I use mRemoteNG to connect to it. I keep all code, databases, etc. in source control and on a separate disk. This way, if I want a new dev VM, I just spin it up, install dev tools (I have a chocolatey script for that;) and attach the disk. It really is enabling to have my machine be separate from my dev environment. I used get so annoyed with all the cruft dev tools, SDKs, etc. add to a system, hog disk, and bog it down. Now I just have outlook, mremoteng, and office on the local machine. May not be appropriate for heavy media work as 1) you need more RAM and 2) audio/video may be choppy through RDP. If you can afford it, though, I highly recommend this approach.

juusto 7y ago

That sounds like a great idea, could you please elaborate further? Which instance and pricing are you using? My use case is media work when abroad. So 16Gb RAM, as much disk space as possible, around 8h a day.

shireboy 7y ago
I have an MSDN subscription which gets me ~200/mo Azure Credit, I think. I use the F4 instance which is 4 core/8GB. I set it in azure to shut down around 10pm, and get an email asking me if I want to extend it. Doing this, I have a few bucks to spare on my credit each month for Azure App Service, etc. I use mRemoteNG to connect to it. I keep all code, databases, etc. in source control and on a separate disk. This way, if I want a new dev VM, I just spin it up, install dev tools (I have a chocolatey script for that;) and attach the disk. It really is enabling to have my machine be separate from my dev environment. I used get so annoyed with all the cruft dev tools, SDKs, etc. add to a system, hog disk, and bog it down. Now I just have outlook, mremoteng, and office on the local machine. May not be appropriate for heavy media work as 1) you need more RAM and 2) audio/video may be choppy through RDP. If you can afford it, though, I highly recommend this approach.