XP mode development in Win 7

I am a developer and have a XP laptop that I use to dev a SQL 2005 database and MSAccess 2003 frontend database as well as VS2003 website.

I want to upgrade to Win 7 using XP mode to install the software above. This is because I still want to install Office 2007 on Win7 etc.

Do you think XP mode on Win7 will be reliable enough for this? 开发者_C百科Also do all xp mode apps have to run in the xp mode window? Is it possible to access xp mode SQL db from Windows 7 mode?

Visual Studio .NET 2003 is not compatible with Windows 7 and would have to be run in XP Mode. Visual Studio 2005 will require Service Pack 1 to work properly as well. SQL Server 2005 will install without a problem at all.

The XP mode offered in Windows 7 is basically an integrated Windows Virtual PC. The XP mode can be reliable (if you think we can call XP reliable) but the performance of a virtual machine will always be lower comparing to a natively installed windows xp.

You can make the SQL db in the XP mode accessible from Windows 7, since XP Mode is essentially a virtual machine, you need to configure the database in the Virtual Machine to allow external connections to it as a database server.