Portable /Virtual / Zero-impact installation and usage of Visual Studio 2008 [closed]

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I want to give a C#/.NET course (for just one or two days) at a local computer club. I want to use all free tools to do so (read VS Express Editions). They have mid-class machines, all with properly licensed XP, but no Visual Studio installed on them.

I would like not to install Visual Studio on all those machines (about a dozen). Too much work for installing and cleaning up afterwards.

What options do I have for a non-impact usage of VS 2008?

Notes:

• I have found the following thread, about using the same VS installation on 2 machines. However, this does not exactly cover my problem: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/8464ccd7-a5be-4133-afbc-d083079c2f42
• VMWare virtual machines would be an option. I could install the player on the boxes, but that would need more XP licenses for all those VM's.
• I could probably boot from a pre-installed and cloned HD with a complete install, but would that really work? Besides I would need a dozen external HD's.
• What about Virtual PC? For VS2010 they have a Virtual PC, afaik, but also for VS2008?

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Do you really have to use Visual Studio? A good alternative is SharpDevelop which is free, and I believe can just be copied to the machine without installation.

The problem with using Visual Studio is that its installation is very long and arduous, so you are quite correct in not wanting to install it on all of those machines.

I suggest you use SharpDevelop in the course, but also show people that there is a free version of Visual Studio so they can choose which one to use themselves.

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Build a VM and deploy VMWare Player on the machines.

And, Yes there should still be vs08 team system eval vpc images around. Not express.

Be sure to fire the image up and get it set up the way you want, then you can copy it onto each machine with a usb drive. VPC is free as well.

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Why not go open source?

Use monodevelop either on windows or on linux - with linux you can create a live CD with all the pre-requisites.

And if monodevelop is not good enough, you can try running VS Express under Wine in linux, it is one of the applications that is most tested/used.

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Why not build an image based on the base Windows Server 2008 install Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and rent out Amazon Elastic Cloud computers? Students could remote dekstop in using low bandwidth. The costs seem compellingly low per hour. This requires you to not have to buy any licenses, just CPU hours and they are relatively low (~12 cents per hour per student).

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/