I found a cool new feature today in Windows 7 that really saved me some time!
I started a project today for a client where they want me to migrate an old classic asp application to ASP.NET MVC 2. In order to test the functionality in the old application I decided to install it on my developer machine which is running Windows 7. The problem here was that the old application had connections with an Access database that required MDAC installed on my machine. But since I run Windows 7 on x64 I can’t install this on my dev machine so I then decided to set up a new VPC on my dev machine with a XP x86 installation. But then a friend recommended to take a look at the new XP Mode in Windows 7 instead and that turned out to be awesome!

All I had to do was to download the Windows XP mode from Microsoft's website (around 500Mb) and then install it. That’s it! No booting up from DVD and installing the OS or anything like that. Once the virtual machine was up and running I installed IIS and then installed the old classic asp application. I had the old application up and running within minutes!

But the cool part here is that I don’t have to have the Virtual Machine up and running to access my application. I can simply run applications from the Virtual Machine without open it up! I can create shortcuts that I then can access from the Windows 7 start menu under “Windows XP Mode Applications”. Pretty cool stuff!

So this is a excellent way to run applications that for some reason does not work on Windows 7 or on x64 like in my example.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx