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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...

After several posts discussing what Windows 8 is in a more general sense, this one is going to try to focus on what it means to ComputerTalk specifically. This means that if you’re not a customer, potential customer, or admirer of ComputerTalk and our products, this might only be interesting from the point of view of a case study: here’s how one person is looking at applying what he learned at build to a product suite.

For the current products that ComputerTalk offers, anything we support on Windows 7 will be supported on Windows 8 in at least its current form, just like we did when Windows 7 released. We’re already working with Microsoft to make sure that both our web and windows clients are compatible with their changes, and so far we’ve already helped them identify some bugs in the current Windows 8 build. The goal is to be Windows 8 compatible at RTM, at least when running our software in desktop mode.