One of the difficult things about writing applications using UCMA is the fact that you need to connect to Lync in order to run or debug any of your code.  In fact, since you can’t connect UCMA applications through the edge server, you need direct access to the front end, which probably means VPN connectivity for any remote work.  On top of that, if you want to be able to provision and debug things on the server side, you’ll need administrative access to the Lync server, so it’s likely that there’ll be a separate development lab environment set up apart from your company’s everyday Lync deployment.  In the ideal case, each developer would have access to their own personal Lync sandbox, since then they could write and test whatever they needed to without impacting anyone else.

Over the past few years, I’ve run into a few people that have built monster laptops that ran Hyper-V and a full Lync stack, but I’d never tried putting one together myself.  Last week though, I finally got the chance, and while it does work, there are a few pitfalls that I found while trying to get everything going.

First, the hardware...

Developing for Windows 8 is going to fall into two camps: the Metro apps and the desktop apps. The chart below breaks things down quite nicely.