I just started out writing some software for a cool device, it's a Suunto Team POD that connects to up to 30 heart rate chest belts wirelessly, and allows you to collect heart rates from all of the belts simultaneously in real time, using a SDK. The hardware comes with some standard Suunto software that I used on my Vista machine to check that it was all working ok, and indeed it was:

The device hooks up using a USB cable, and Suunto provides a USB Serial Driver, that makes it show up as a COM port.

Happy that the hardware was working, I switched to my development environment, which is a Windows Server 2003 machine running inside of a Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. I installed the same software in the VPC as I had on the Vista host, but when I ran it, it could not detect the device. After fishing around, I found that there was no Suunto USB Serial Port installed on the VPC. This is what it looks like on the host:

So, I started googling Suunto USB Serial drivers, and then just VPC 2007 USB drivers, and guess what I found? Well I guess the title of this blog gave it away.... VPC does not support USB! See here for an extensive explanation... not! Strangely, USB is supported on the Mac version! And some of the services that USB devices expose can be used in VPC, for instance drives made available for memory sticks, keyboards, mice etc.

There are no dates as to when USB support will be added to VPC, although Microsoft acknowledges that is is a much requested and high priority feature. VMWare does support VPC.

So, I guess I will be installing VMWare!