Microsoft have been offering virtual machines for years now [1].<p>I know they offered Virtual PC and VirtualBox previously, is the news that Parallels is now supported?<p>[1] <a href="http://superuser.com/q/109944/23461" rel="nofollow">http://superuser.com/q/109944/23461</a>
Correction: free limited Windows VM images for testing Microsoft browsers.<p>You can't just throw these on a copy of your favorite virtualization platform and have a free copy of Windows to legally do whatever you'd like with, indefinitely.
So the main point seems to be MS has killed modern.ie -site and redirect to this dev.windows.com site. Still useful once in a while although the big disk images are PITA to download and setup. I have better uses for my laptop SSD than to fill it with different IEs and Windowses :p
I know I'm old, but a 5Gig download just to run Edge on OS X? (And that's a 5Gug zipfile, I wonder how much of my SSD that's gonna eat unzipped?)<p>In the plus side, Chrome says "6 minutes left", and I've only just clicked download. I suspect my network bandwidth improvements over the years make this no less an imposition than the outrageous 200+Kb download for Doom over a 14.4k modem...)
90 day limited demo version of Windows. Make sure you back up the original image in case your demo expires and you need to restore the image from the original.<p>I remember Microsoft used to offer ISOS of Windows with a 90 day limited trial key. There was a utility that would reset the demo clock as well as a command line option to reset it for another 90 days.
On a OSX/Linux I was always using <a href="https://github.com/xdissent/ievms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/xdissent/ievms</a> to get Windows VM that I want.
It's probably not the intended use case, but I use these more often for testing desktop applications than for testing web pages. It's a shame there's no 64-bit VMs.
if you want to use it with Vagrant: <a href="https://github.com/whatwedo/vagrant-ievms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/whatwedo/vagrant-ievms</a>
are these still time limited? Because I'd rather have the desktop with feature limits than time limits. Having to reinstall the VM because of a 30-day limit is just a waste of time.
Ah, hopefully one day the ReactOS project will be sufficient and not require these dodgy VMs.<p>In particular, I'd love to install ReactOS and build LibreOffice, er, natively.
At some point someone is going to have ask the questions: Who is gaming HN, why is this news and at the top spot of HackerNews? MS has been offering this for years and yet every once in a while I see posts similar to this on the front page.