Evaluating Developer Boxes

Question

What's the recommended hardware a .net developer today should work with. Is there software that can provide evaluation for machines in this regard?

Answer 1

http://blogs.msdn.com/ddperf/archive/2008/12/23/visual-studio-2010-hardware-requirements.aspx

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1212419/system-requirements-for-visual-studio-2010

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/08/the-programmers-bill-of-rights.html

As a developer, multiple monitors are now a must, at least 3

The faster the CPUs the better, multi-core cpus are also a must

100+Gb 10k rpm disk, or even better one of the solid state drives, do your homework on those though.

8Gb ram minimum

Graphics card depends on what you're working on, obviously game development is going to require more, but at minimum something that will run those 3+ monitors (will probably take more than one card to do that)

Answer 2

Definitely have multiple monitors in there. It's a god send. Start at a minimum of 2. Get 3 if you can afford it.

Our esteemed website curator Jeff Atwood has a blog post detailing the benefits. In fact, he is a staunch advocate for multiple monitors, as he has talked about it for years (see the links in the blog post).

Answer 3

Hm, there is no standard, but here my 2 cents:

• Good computer, fast processor. The moment you turn on FxCop you want a lot of fast cores for anything but the smallest project.

• Memory. 8gb is ok ;)

• Graphics card - I move to 5750's ATI, driving 3+ monitors. Screen space is valuable.

• Good discs. There are some nice websites reporting a LOT of speedup with a SSD. A fast hard disc may be sufficient. Will have to try that one out soonish.

Answer 4

That's a really vague question - you need to say more of what you're doing. If you're building PS cmdlets that do nifty things with AD, you can do it on a 3-year old laptop with no sweat. If you need two instances of SQL Server Developer Edition, IIS, and streaming media, you're going to want some workstation-class stuff, or maybe even a server to host the infrastructure (and then you can do the dev work on a three-year-old laptop).