Building an old project environment

I got a new job to do.

I need to update the old Pawnshop-application.
That should be a business as usual, but the problem is all the old tools I used in that project. If I recall right, the year was 2005 when the common programming environment was Windows NT, Visual C++ 6, MFC, ObjectiveGrid7, Linux RedHat and Fedora 9 and Sybase 11 for Linux.

Hmmm... I finally found all those backups but where to install all this stuff ? I really hope that VirtualBox will solve this problem. I've got a brand new HP laptop with Win7-64bit. Now VirtualBox is up and running many Linux distributions like Fedora9 & 16. If I only get WinNT and Visual C++ 6 with odbc installed on the same virtual environment, maybe I could deliver the most urgent changes to my client.

To get Visual C++ 6 running on top of Win7 is not an easy task. I hope the source code can be build with Visual Studio 2008 on top of WinXP and linked with Objective Grid and all this still works with odbc-drivers. Intresting.

Of course I need to port the Pawnshop-aplication to latest Visual Studio 10/win7 and MySQL-database.

New server and new way to use computers

In my new job it is important to have several operating systems available to test software before publishing to the customers. There comes e.g. Parallels and VirtualBox into great use. If, and when, things go wrong, it is easy to return back to the old snapshots.

Now my home server got a new life. It was upgraded a lot and configured in a new way. It is also great to find out that my laptop is able to show several user interfaces at the same screen at the same time. The native system is Ubuntu Gnome, of course :) But it starts Virtual environments as well. Currently two versions on Windows/Visual Studio and now yet another user interface from my Ubuntu server by VNCServer/vncviewer. Confusing but intresting :)

I really like virtualization and remote use of these systems.