Setup VMs for your IE Testing Pleasure
Greeting's all! This will be a relatively short post but aimed with some hopefully useful content to you. Thankfully I've had the privilege of being able to avoid testing/supporting IE a decent bit in my career thusfar but times are a changing and I have some code reviews on me for testing fixes in IE10 with one coming up shortly for IE8!
In the past I simply used a Windows PC next to me but I haven't reliably kept that machine up and running so I decided to move to using Virtual Machine's instead as they are a really handy and powerful alternative to actually having multiple machines around with different operating systems installed. I'm going to go over a few quick steps I took to being able to have a VM running Windows 7 with IE10 already prebuilt for me on my Macbook. If you'd like to read a little bit on what virtual machine's are in the first place, read here to do so!
The VM Software
There are all kind's of alternative's out there that can suite different use cases. For me I needed something easy to use, setup and that allowed me to be up and running in a relatively short amount of time. I went with VirtualBox because it not only does all of the aforementioned amicably but it's also multi platform and open source!
Obtaining and Using the Images
Getting useful images for Windows can be a real PITA compared to say Linux but thanks for the people of modern.IE it's really simple to have Windows downloaded, installed and running the desired version of Internet Explorer in no time. You have multiple options here to download everything but since I'm using a UNIX based system and am slowly becoming a command line junky I'm going to go with what is probably the easiest and quickest solution.
First you are going to need to open your favourite terminal application. I personally just stick with the Terminal app that comes installed on OSX but whatever you fancy should work just fine. Next you need to navigate to wherever you plan on keeping all of your VMs on your machine ( I made a folder called VMs in my Documents ).
modern.IE has a really useful way of installing everything for UNIX based systems ( or anything that has access to a cURL like command ) that allows me to download everything at once. Once you have selected a desired testing OS ( Mac, in my case ) and the VM platform you are using ( Virtual Box, in my case ) your page should look something like:
From there all you need to do is click on the desired Grab them all with cURL link and copy the command given. For example, if we selected IE10 - Win 7 our command would look like the following below. Once you paste that in your terminal just hit enter and all the neccesary files will be downloaded!
curl -O "https://az412801.vo.msecnd.net/vhd/IEKitV1_Final/VirtualBox/OSX/IE10_Win7/IE10.Win7.For.MacVirtualBox.part{1.sfx,2.rar,3.rar,4.rar}"
Extracting and running the Image
After it's done downloading the necessary files we need to extract it all so we can run it in VirtualBox. First, we need to set permissions on the .sfx file that
was downloaded and afterward's it's as simple as running that executable. This is a two step process ( or one, if you like chaining commands together ), like so:
chmod +x ./IE10.Win7.For.MacVirtualBox.part1.sfx && ./IE10.Win7.For.MacVirtualBox.part1.sfx
After that it's as simple as double clicking the generated .ova file ( in this case, IE10.Win7.For.Mac.VirtualBox.ova ) and it will auto open in VirtualBox.
From there you can always change a few settings ( increasing the available RAM is a good choice ) but that's basically all you have to do! If you want to read up a little more on this,
check out this helpful blog post I found that really made the process easy for me to
do.