Shell access to $NOT_MY_ENVIRONMENT for development?
I'm a self employed hacker. My development (actually, my total) infrastructure consists of a six-year old laptop running Linux with a full disk and a noisy fan, and a rented virtual server, also Linux. I have a few modules up on CPAN, which occasionally receive reports from cpantesters or the odd individual user with a build/test failure on a platform I don't have access to. Blinding attempting fixes and waiting for reports is tedious and inefficient.
There are a few no-cost BSD shell providers around, which has allowed me to develop and test directly on that platform. However I haven't found anything similar for Win32. I vaguely remember some offering from Microsoft for CPAN developers, but can no longer find any reference to it. Can someone jog my memory, or give me a pointer to an alternative service?
I blog about Perl.
Adam Kennedy had tried to set up some deal through Microsoft for a Windows build farm, but last I heard the middle managers got weirded out.
I just use virtual machines so I can have several versions of Windows locally.
If you want to have something that you can use remotely, a friend of mine pointed me towards CloudShare and Windows Azure.
You can also see if any of the Windows VPSs at LowEndBox work for you.