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We spend large amounts of time setting up each new development machine we configure for developers - usually around 6 hours or so.

We were thinking of something along the lines of Ghost, but each installation is machine-specific, so I guess that won't work.

Is there any program or method by which we can bundle the entire thing: Windows, multiple versions of Visual Studio, multiple versions of SQL Server, WinRAR, PowerISO, etc?

THANKS

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If you're trying to deal with a heterogeneous set of developer machines, I can only suggest abstracting the hardware and running dev tools on virtual machines. I have been involved in several projects where we successfully created a master VM image and then distributed it to the devs. You do run into some minor issues with needing to handle duplicate SIDs or name collisions, but those are pretty mainstream issues for VM deployments with known solutions: http://www.petri.co.il/guide-to-creating-and-cloning-virtual-machines.htm

On the other end of the spectrum, I've worked on two huge projects at a company with lots of support resources, and their solution was to have massive, complicated perl scripts that managed install and config of all the needed dev tools and prerequisites. But most of us don't work at places that have 5 dedicated full-time perl monkeys cranking out support tools.

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If Perl monkeys aren't being nice to you, you could try scripting an MSI or NSIS installer. This will require understanding what changes besides the file system (in other words registry keys). You will need to figure out what is installation dependent and code around that.

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