Tools of a SharePoint consultant

Here is a quick post sharing a few tips on what I have learnt out of painful experience in forming the ideal sharepoint development environment for a consultant.

1. Definitely Virtualize: Unless you are a masochist, you will end up virtualizing. Even within Virtualizing there are plenty of choices. I personally like to use VMWare Workstation 6.0 which I feel is a lot better than Virtual Server or Virtual PC. Here is a convincing screenshot -
   
    
   
   
2. A Powerful Machine: As a consultant, you have to travel quite a bit. Even if you don't travel, I have found that the convenience, and portability of laptops trumps the added power of a desktop. I do have a desktop at home with huge displays and full size keyboard, mouse, audio system whatever - but - my main workhorse machine, is a laptop. My laptop is a Dell, 17" (1920X1200), T7500 CPU, Santa Rosa, 160G 7200RPM HDD, 3G RAM, High end display card machine. The only place it sucks is in an airplane seat - other than that it totally rocks. Later down the road I will put in a second SSD HDD, so I can virtualize machines on the SSD HDD. You would note that I have 3Gs of RAM, not 4. 4Gs of RAM IMO is waste of $. The extra 300K that you get (Laptops cannot address full 4Gs), is not worth the additional $400.
3. Operating System: I use Windows Vista 32 bit. Why 32 bit? Because compatibility is important to me, and 64 bit doesn't buy me much as of today. Also, my host OS is purely a business OS, I use it for MS Word, MS Excel, Project, Outlook etc. VMWare Workstation 6.0 runs very well on Vista, so all my real work gets virtualized.
4. The Virtual Machine: 99% of whatever you wish to do with MOSS2007 can be done on a single machine. No domain controller, No AD. Very rarely do you need to scale beyond multiple machines, and truthfully, running multiple VMs is a dog. My main workhorse sharepoint machine runs the following:
1. Win2k3
2. SQL Server Dev edition (not express)
3. IIS/ASP.NET
4. VS2005 (though I do have another one snapshotted on Orcas)
5. Pop3 Server/SMTP ---> No need for full fledged exchange.
6. MOSS 2007 complete install.
7. Use Local accounts instead of AD Accounts.
5. Other Virtual Machines: Rarely, but not never, do you need a domain. For this purpose, I use two additional virtual setups.
1. The first setup is a PDC with MOSS installed on it. This has significant limitations especially around search. But if I want to write AD Aware code, say in relationship with profiles etc, I can still get by with a single VM running.
2. The second setup consists of two machines - one is a PDC with POP3/SMTP and SQL Server, and a MOSS WFE. Very very rarely do I ever need to boot into this. If ever I have a usecase that needs this specific configuration (example, testing BDC with impersonation over multiple machines - rare case), I wait till I am around my home machine or in office so I can scale multiple VMs on multiple machines. Clearly not my first choice.
1. I have toyed with the idea of getting  UMPC and run that as the PDC. Haven't taken that leap of faith yet. Frankly this is not such a huge issue most of the time. The problem with that would be the need to carry a network hub, cables, or connect on Wifi and accidentally pair with an Airbus A380 in the process.
6. When developing as a team: Use a server based virtualization product such as ESX Server, and leverage domains/seperate sql server/domain seperation etc. Developing as a team is a whole another post frankly.
7. Sharepoint designer: .. is a pig at times. So I frequently find myself running SPD on the host OS, not on the guest OS.