Virtual Machines, Portable Apps and Delphi

Delphi developers have a number of issues where a VM may make life easier:

• allowing Delphi development on a non-WinOS machine such as a Mac using VMWare Fusion, etc
• allowing one to “backup” just their development environment to avoid having to do a full re-install of Delphi and all the 3rd party components which is a very time consuming process
• allowing one to have isolated test environments for their apps with the option of different versions of operating systems and installation configurations
• potentially allow a “portable” version of their Delphi development environment which is not restricted to the one machine – although I am not aware of anyone who has succeeded in this nor how Embarcadero or the Third Party component licences cope with such environments, but it would sure make managing your development environment so much easier to backup and restore

Delphi on a Mac:

• VMWare Fusion is a common VM environment used and is very popular amongst Delphi XE2 developers who also want to create apps for MacOS and iOS
• the main alternative VM on a Mac is Parallels
• either VM requires a Windows licence per VM as well as VM software purchase

Windows Virtual PC and XP Mode on a Windows 7 machine:

• Windows 7 makes it very easy to create a Windows XP VM through its “XP Mode” which fortunately does not require additional purchase of a WinXP licence
• unfortunately, Win7 does not make it easy to have multiple versions, but this can be achieved as follows:
• using Microsoft’s “difference” feature to create multiple VM’s linked to a main VM
• an old manual VM copy method for multiple XP mode VM’s
• the Win7 published shortcuts to apps within the XP Mode may need to be manually copied for the new VM’s – see %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC\Virtual Applications\Windows XP Mode on the physical Win7 machine to find the shortcuts for publishing
• having cloned VMs running concurrently on a network requires additional work to ensure they are seen as individual machines – one can use sysprep utility to manage this (see here for a tutorial), or the manual method to edit the MAC address in the .vmc file which is just an XML file and can be edited in Notepad

VMWare Workstation for VMs on Windows OS:

• see VMWare

Creating zero-install portable apps:

• VMWare’s Thinapp is incredibly expensive (~$7,000!)
• Cameyo is a simple to use freeware product which may be of use