I used to use a setup similar to this before WSL was a thing (Hyper-V VM). The "accessing your files" issue trips people up but there's a trivial solution.. ins

I used to use a setup similar to this before WSL was a thing (Hyper-V VM). The "accessing your files" issue trips people up but there's a trivial solution.. install Samba in your dev VM and mount it on the host. Unsurprisingly, WSL2 does something similar (it uses the 9p protocol instead of SMB though).