After 6 months working through legal and technical hurdles with Microsoft Australia and their hosting partner Emantra, and a month of beta testing, I'm happy to report that the CPAN Testing Laboratory is now open for general access.
The initial incarnation consists of 7 virtual hosts with the following operating systems.
1. Windows XP Professional
2. Windows Server 2003 32-bit
3. Windows Server 2003 64-bit
4. Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
5. Windows Server 2008 32-bit
6. Windows Server 2006 64-bit
7. Windows 7 Beta
These machines are intended for ad-hoc testing and development by CPAN authors, and currently all of them are configured for exclusive access by a single user (to allow for complete flexibility in testing).
I've set up a specific #msopensource channel on irc.perl.org to help authors coordinate their usage of the different machines and for administration purposes. If you would like a login to the testing lab, you can either join the channel of (If I'm not there) email me via my adamk@cpan address.
For the time being, to create an account I'll need your CPAN id, full name, and a unique password that you don't mind me (or any other admins) seeing.
Because the current lab is quite experimental (both for us and for Microsoft), the current plan is to observe how people use it over the next 6 months and improve it incrementally as needed.
Finally, thank you all for your patience over the last 6 months, and thanks in particular to the guys at Microsoft that helped spearhead this effort through to completion. Of particular mention out of the dozen people involved:
Cristoph Otto, Software Test Engineer, Microsoft Open Source Software Lab
Anandeep Pannu, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Open Source Software Lab
Sam Ramji, Senior Director, Microsoft Open Source Software Lab
Lawrence Crumpton, Platform Strategy Manager, Microsoft Australia
Jorke Odolphi, Web Platform Architect Evangelist, Microsoft Australia
Truly awesome!
Great job, Adam!
Is the Office suite installed?
(This is just out of curiosity, I probably wouldn't do any Win32::Word::Writer development regardless)
Re:Office
Alias on 2009-07-21T08:41:37
No. The working principle for the first generation lab is to run with nothing at all installed beyond the base installation of the OS.
This is mainly so that we don't accidentally block work on X because we installed Y which is incompatible.
There is a shared drive for holding installers on though, and if it is needed I can discuss getting access to various things.
Alias++!
Thanks much for the work you've put into this. I'm sure I'm not the only one that appreciates this, and I HAVE Win32 machines at home I can program on!
There are relatively few smoke testing running MSWin32 systems.
Having automated smoke testing running on these 7 machines would be a huge win for Perl by significantly increasing the testing of CPAN modules on windows systems
