Developing via Remote Desktop

Question

Has anybody any successful remarks about having a team working via Remote Desktop?

In many workplaces, we put end users via Citrix and the applications on a central, powerful server. Sometimes the clients are in the same building as the server, but often, they are remote.

There could be some huge benefits for me to put my developers on Windows XP or Vista instances running on a couple servers with Hyper-V.

I'm worried that RDP/RDC via the internet would be too slow for somebody to be able to develop efficiently.

I'm sure I can hear plenty of bad things about it... are there any people out there that have had success?

Solution 1

I have seen a situation where the attempt was made to do this with a sattelite office. It was done for a java development team using various java IDE tools. The result wasn't regarded as a success, and the company brought the team back into a central London office at considerable expense.

For someone doing this on a day-in day-out basis on interactive software, the result isn't really very pleasant. For something that mainly uses text-based tools such as vim and unix command line tools, it works somewhat better. At one point I had XVNC going over a 128 Kbit DSL link (of a type that was prevalent in New Zealand at the time) and could do work on an Oracle-based data warehouse at a remote location quite readily. The level of interactivity required by the tooling made them much less sensitive to the slow link than a Windows-based IDE.

So, I'll invoke the 'it depends' argument with some qualifications:

• I would not recommend it for a modern IDE, and certainly not for something heavily graphical like Dreamweaver, BI Development Studio or Informatica.

• For a textual environment like traditional unix development tools it could probably be made to work quite well. These user interfaces are much less sensitive to latency than a direct-manipulation user interface.

I'm something of a believer in the 'best tools' principle. Going out of your way to give a second-rate user interface to a development team will give off negative signals. The cost saving from doing this is likely to be minimal and it will annoy some of your team members. Even if it can be made to work reasonably well you are still making a value statement by doing this. Weigh the cost saving against the cost of replacing one or more of your key development staff.

Solution 2

We connect to our development environments using RDP and locally the performance is great. It slows a bit over VPN, but is still acceptably responsive.

Turn off all the windows animation functionality, desktop background, etc. and that will help considerably.

Solution 3

If you're not worried about the latency on audio and fast-moving imagery and you're not developing anything dependent on 3D hardware, you'll likely be fine.

I've never used it in a team environment, but I use my laptop RDP'd into my workstation all day and love it.

Solution 4

I've worked in an environment where we would occasionally edit some existing code via remote desktop. There were no significant challenges to this. As a developer I positively hated doing that work. Everything felt slow and unresponsive. However, we got the work done.

Thankfully these were often short 3-4 hours jobs... mostly fixes to existing systems on remote customer sites. I don't think I could recommend it as a normal way of doing work, but its certainly possible.

Solution 5

I've used both VNC and RDP over a DSL connection, running through an SSH tunnel, and have had no real issues.

There are definitely some lags, particularly if you're redrawing large parts of a screen. But most development involves small edits, and both of these protocols handle that very well.

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Comments

[Stewart Robinson]

I do the same thing. When I'm in the office I use my workstation, remotely I use my laptop to simply RDC in.

[Pathmapratheep]

Agreed, it certainly is doable. You do notice the difference, but you can adjust to it. I look forward to window's 7 and it's support for dual monitors via RDP. The hardest part for me to deal with is having 2 monitors at work and 2 monitors at home but only being able to use 1 when remoting in.

[Chris Ballance]

Dual monitor support over RDP would be a huge win for me.

[Jason]

The developers are in another country, equipment is very expensive there (2x the costs) and to fix problems with the OS, it would be easier to have them here, in the states.

[Vilx-]

Well, as for the OS and other software problems - if the developers are any good they will be quite able to take care of their own computers. If they are not then you should seriously reconsider how good they actually are.

[Vilx-]

Hardware costs I can agree with. I'm also living in a country where hardware is about 2x more expensive than in the US. But... somehow it doesn't keep people from getting good PCs around here. In fact, chances are that your developers already have good machines of their own.

[Vilx-]

Plus, RD in one country is kinda OK, but foreign traffic is usually quite capped in many places. You should check with your developers that it's at all possible to use RD from their homes/workplaces/whatever.

[Vilx-]

I personally would prefer to develop on a slower local computer than a faster remote computer that is barely useable even with the graphics turned to the "crap" level. You know, 256 colors is a torture in its own right...