Our network team is thinking of setting up a virtual desktop environment (via Windows 2008 virtual host) for each developer.
So we are going to have dumb terminals/laptops and should be using the virtual desktops for all of our work.
Ours is a Microsoft shop and we work with all versions of .net framework. Not having the development environments on the laptops is making the team uncomfortable.
Are there any potential problems with that kind of setup? Is there any reason to be worried about this setup?
Unless there’s a very good development-oriented reason for doing this, I’d say don’t.
Your developers are going to work best in an environment they want to work in. Unless your developers are the ones suggesting it and pushing for it, you shouldn’t be instituting radical changes in their work environments without very good reasons.
I personally am not at all a fan of remote virtualized instances for development work, either. They’re often slower, you have to deal with network issues and latency, you often don’t have as much control as you would on your own machine. The list goes on and on, and little things add up to create major annoyances.