DLLs and Windows 2000 Terminal Services

[Rich Grubbs]

My project is going to consist of about 40-50 developers using Visual C++. We will be updating a significant amount of existing code that makes heavy use of DLLs and COM. All of this was developed by developers who were working on their own machines.

Our company wants to use Windows 2000 Terminal Services as the development platform instead of the developers using their own machines. The development team is scattered across several time zones.

A number of us are extremely concerned about this when it comes to testing our software.
- We are worried about how DLLs get registered. In some cases, the same DLL may be getting modified by different developers. If the DLLs are not managed independently, one developer could wipe out the others version of the same DLL.
- There is a similar concern about registry entries.

Has anyone tried doing distributed software development using Terminal Services?

[Kdr Kane]

Here are some points you can bring up to your management:

1. Are they willing to experiment with $30-70k cost of the Terminal Server for a possible non-viable solution for the developers?

2. How many times and how often does each developer rebuild their workstation? Not possible with a TS solution.

3. DLL **** can "possibly" be eliminated with .Net server. However, I haven't tested .Net in a Terminal Server situation. Also, your developers would probably have to specifically develop all applications to support the .Net framework. That's a lot of retraining.

4. I'm not even going to get into the specific user rights developers need to compile and debug applications.

After all, it may look good on paper. But, I feel that a TS solution for this purpose is totally wrong. You may not get much response to this question simply because I've never heard of anybody trying such a silly thing.

But, then again, it really depends on what kind of code your developers are writing.