Reconditioning My Development Environment

I was assigned to a project in San Antonio by my company for half of 2009. Now that I am back home, I've been getting my development environment reconditioned:

• Install all necessary updates for Windows XP
• Install all necessary updates for Windows Vista
• Update platform SDK's for Windows XP.
• Install the Visual Studio 2008 Feature Pack (for TR1 extensions) on the Vista VM
• Install XNA and Silverlight tools
• Check in all files to VSS 2005
• Analyze and repair VSS 2005 databases
• Make sure that WinROTT and DCDFLIB compile
• Unit test compile output
• Backup www.codewiz51.com web site to my hard drive

Observations:

1. I was amazed at how many files remained checked out after I returned from San Antonio.
2. I run Vista on a VMWare 6.5 Workstation.  It took the better part of seven hours to download and install all of the updates.  (And that is just for the base Vista install.  I usually clone the base when I want to perform development or testing work.)
3. I must have left DCDFLIB in an undefined compile state back in Februrary 2009.  It took an hour to get the program to compile and produce correct unit test results.
4. I or my son inadvertently installed a later release of DirectX 9 on my XP box, and WinROTT would not compile.  It took an hour to restore the previous version and reset all the evnironment paths.
5. All in all, I had planned on spending one evening making sure I could resume my after hours development work.  Instead, I spent three long evenings getting everything put back together.

Moral of the story: stuff on your PC changes even if you are not using it.  The junk that was installed while I was away had a much greater impact than I anticipated.