Web development: Ready-made VMs to test under all IE versions

Internet Explorer is a nightmare for each and every web developer on this planet.
Now here is at least some help in testing your code with different IE versions and even if you are not developing on Windows.

MS has started to provide ready-made VMs to facilitate testing with different IE versions during website development.

The VMs are available…

• for Windows, Mac and Linux host systems
• for all major virtualization systems:
  VMWare, VirtualBox, Virtual PC, Hyper-V
• in versions with IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, IE 9 and IE 10

The Windows guest system is preinstalled in the VMs. You have a limited choice of Win XP, Vista, 7 and 8 depending on the VM system and the IE version that you desire.

All Windows versions in the VMs will expire (Windows will prompt you to activate it) after some time:

• The XP versions expire after 90 days and cannot be rearmed or used in any way without reactivation then.
• The higher Win versions expire after 30 days and can be rearmed twice. After 90 days and two rearms you can still use them for one hour each time you start them.
  So you better go for Win 7 or higher if you have the choice. Unfortunately IE6 is only available on XP.

Attention:  I tried to uncompress the files that I downloaded with 7-Zip and it failed! But the self-extraction of the RAR files did the trick. So better don’t try your favorite archive utility on these files unless you have to.

Go get the VMs here:
http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads

And read some valuable background information in this blog post by MS developer Rey Bango:
http://blog.reybango.com/2013/02/04/making-internet-explorer-testing-easier-with-new-ie-vms/