When I first installed Windows Vista I was a little worried that I would not be able to use all my development tools, like Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, so I wanted to install an XP virtual machine just in case. I soon found out that the only version of Microsoft Virtual PC that would run on Vista was a beta of Virtual PC 2007, so I installed that, and it actually worked nicely.

Well, now the release version of Virtual PC 2007 is here. You can download the full version for free from the Microsoft Download Center. I downloaded it and installed it (you need to uninstall the beta version first – don’t worry, your virtual machines are left intact).

VPC 2007 runs on most host Windows versions, all the way back to Windows 98. It can of course host Vista, so this is a great way to start testing Vista and application compatibility in a sandbox environment.