After I released my beta, I sent it to a friend of mine who is going to be doing some testing for me. The program wouldn't run on her machine. Then I realized - I hadn't tested my program on a non-development machine. I had tried it on my current laptop and my old laptop, but I had been developing on both and had, as it turned out, I had registered a type library I was using. The type library is part of a 3rd party program I am working with and they told me it did not need to be registered, that their program would register it automatically. That was not the case, however, as we verified with a Windows Live Meeting with my friend. So my installation will need to register this file.
Obviously I need to test in more environments. But I have a limited number of computers. So I set up Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007. It's a free program that lets you install multiple copies of Windows operating systems on one computer. Unlike a dual-boot setup, you install the operating systems on a "virtual" PC so that you can open the virtual PC in another window, without having to close your other open applications. (You do have to buy copies of the operating systems you install.)
I installed Virtual PC without any problems and then installed Windows XP on it (the same system my friend has who was having the problem). But I ran into a problem trying to connect to the network from the virtual Windows XP. It didn't seem to see my wireless network card. I spent several hours on it before giving up. But today, I e-mailed a friend of mine who has worked with virtual machines before and he had a solution for me. Now I am all set up and ready to install my program on this virtual machine and see how it goes.
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