Question

Other than the possible lag issues, has anyone tried this? What are the pros or cons associated with this?

Answer 1

A lot of times for me it’s the limitations of the remote desktop connection, be it VNC or RDP or whatever. For examples:

1. My workstation has two monitors. Remotely viewing my workstation reduces it to one.
2. Lag is tolerable in the IDE, but not with anything image-heavy. Everything from photoshopping to web browsing is done locally, not on the remote machine.
3. Adding to #2, when splitting up tasks between the local and remote machine, there’s that extra layer of getting the two to play nice together that adds just a little bit of overhead per task, which adds up to a lot overall. Something as simple as saving a file from the web browser and opening it in the IDE takes more steps.

(I may think of more and add them later.)

All in all, it’s fine if the setup can be adjusted properly. In my experience, the companies I’ve worked for have defined their remote connection capabilities by the needs of someone other than the software developers, and thus leave us with little pet peeves that make the process just slightly more difficult than it needs to be.