Multiple users using single installation of Visual Studio

We are a group of four students who have to develop SharePoint web parts for a certain project. After two weeks of trying out various options, the only possible way we could do it was to set up a Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit virtual machine (using VMware Player) on a Windows 7 Professional 64-bit desktop with an i3 540 (because it supports VT, unlike the laptops we four have), make four user accounts on the VM OS, and remote desktop into it from our laptops to develop. The VM has Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint SDKs installed.

My question is; if we create four different projects in Visual Studio, can we concurrently use that single installation of Visual Studio from remote desktop to work on our individual projects?

If yes, what kind of problems should we expect and how can we ensure we don't run into开发者_开发技巧 them?

Alternatively, is there another more trouble-free way of working this out (like changing some setting in Visual Studio to allow multiple instances, etc.)?

Thanks!

While this should work without issues, I would take care with an issue like this.

I would first verify that this is allowed under your current licensing for Visual Studio. I suspect that this is likely a violation of the license agreement, and as such, I would take care with trying to find a better solution. It may be allowed under your license (as there are many different forms of licensing), but I would check this very carefully prior to operating in this manner.

That being said, I suspect this will work fine. Visual Studio does take care to work and store settings per user account, so there is likely no issue. Microsoft Support would be the proper channel for support if you do run into any problems while operating, however.

If your laptops are 64-bit, I would install Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on each of your laptops. If your laptops are 32-bit, I would create 4 separate virtual servers.

Beyond the licensing that Reed points out, I would be concerned about resource sharing. During a SharePoint 2007 project, we had 3 developers sharing a single SharePoint virtual server with Visual Studio 2008 installed on each of our laptops. Everything went fine for awhile until development got really heavy. As soon as one developer would finish running a deployment job, another would start one. The application pool was down so often that the web sites were unusable. Everything was fine once we each got our own virtual server.

If you really must use one server (not recommended), then i would suggest you create 4 seperate web applications. This means they will each get a seperate application pool. Then each users should still be able to debug their webparts without effecting the other users. The debugger should only "break" the application pool that the user is on.