This post may be a big yawn for experienced developers - but might help someone somewhere.
In the last few days - using VirtualBox (doesn't have to be that - so lets just say a virtual environment on my PC) I now have running
Native Mac
VM XP running IE6 (it still sucks)
VM XP running IE8,
VM WIN 7 running IE9
VM Ubuntu running Firefox
So now I can test my app in All browsers and most OS's before release to production
MORE Importantly, I have an eval copy of AIM running on another VM and the greatest discovery is - with frequent use of the Snapshotting facility, If I write and test a new process which affects the database (MySQL) content in some way - and it doesn't work as I expect, I can quickly (two clicks) go back to the previous snapshot and restore the entire VM to a previous state both the AIM environment AND the MySQL database
provided snapshots are taken frequently, both new snapshots and Rollback literally take seconds because they use image differencing techniques
But before anyone asks or even thinks about asking - rollback DOES NOT defeat either the Microsoft "30 days until Activation" OR AIM 30 day evaluation algorithms
So with XP end of life coming up in April, this could also be a good way of keeping your current XP license(s) alive in a kind of protected Sandboxed Environment
