Building a Virtualized UC Development Environment:

My co worker Chris Mayo just put this post up on his blog. He does a bunch around UC and development on that platform. Check out this series of post he is doing so you can setup a UC environment to start development on.

In my previous post, I mentioned that it’s possible to use Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services and Remote Desktop Connection to provide a virtualized development environment for OCS 2007 R2, Exchange 2007 and the UC R2 platform SDKs. Over the next few posts, I’ll walk you through how to set up that environment based on the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 VHDs.

This environment has a couple of pros and cons:

Pros:

Your team can develop without the need to join the development environment domain.
Developers on your team don’t need to run multiple VMs on their local machine.
Each developer can log into multiple Remote Desktop sessions from the same machine to see the effects of placing calls between two contacts, changes in presence, call transfers, etc.

Cons:

Remote Desktop does not support the microphone on the host machine, so you can’t provide audio input to calls or speech recognition. However:
- Playing sound from your Remote Desktop session is supported, so you will hear audio.
- You can still place calls either through OC 2007 R2 or via code, so you can test call scenarios.
- For audio applications, you can do simple testing with DTMF tones.
- You’ll need a physical client machine for testing speech recognition. See the setup document for details on adding physical clients to this environment.

In this post, I’ll provide a step by step process for building the Terminal Services machine. Grab a cup of coffee and let’s get started:

1. Set up the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 VHDs per the instructions included with those virtual machines.

2. Start Hyper-V Manager by selecting Start, All Programs, Administrative Tools and Hyper-V Manager.