posted on Monday, June 06, 2005 8:43 PM
by
roydictus
Total Coolness: Microsoft's (free) online Virtual Labs
Microsoft launched a really cool initiative today: the Virtual Lab. Using it, you can perform exercises such as those at Tech-Ed's Hands-On Labs from your own PC over the Internet.
That's right: via your Internet Explorer, you connect to a full virtual PC that has all the software installed you need to do the exercise you selected first -- for example, you may want to experience ClickOnce Deployment firsthand, or you may want to experiment with C# 2.0 without downloading and installing Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 or the Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Beta 2.
The procedure is simple: register for free, select the virtual lab you want to try your hand at, open the PDF that guides you step by step (a good idea is of course to print it), then connect to your very “own” virtual PC over the Internet and start clicking away! You don't have to be afraid of f..., ahem, messing up because it's a virtual machine and it gets deleted after you've used it anyway. Run into trouble? Close your session and open another, fresh one.
Microsoft is putting a number of such virtual labs online and more are coming. I think it's the greatest idea since trialware!