As many of you may be aware, you can only have one version of Internet Explorer installed at any given time (the exception being that the IE Platform Previews are able to install side-by-side with a released version of IE). Given this, Microsoft has for some time provided virtual machines for the purposes of testing applications against different versions of Internet Explorer.

Recently, the eXtreme. tech. blog on blogs.technet.com announced the availability of updated VMs for app compatibility testing. Here’s the announcement

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So the base Internet Explorer (IE) Virtual PC (VPC) images were due for a refresh and I signed up for the job. I thought it would be best to not only simply patch the images and place them up on the site, but to also reassess how we could optimize the images and options available. Previously, there were three separate Windows XP images (IE6, IE7, IE8) and one Windows Vista SP1 with IE8 image. To optimize, I decided it would be best to have the following images:

• Windows XP IE6 (with install bits on the drive for IE7 and IE8)
• Windows Vista IE7 (with install bits on the drive for IE8)
• Windows 7 IE8 (with install bits on the drive for IE9)
• Windows 7 IE9 + ACT 5.6, Expression Super Preview.

It is very easy to duplicate the images and then just update the version of IE you’d like to keep. I’d be happy to accept feedback on what you think of this new structure of VPC images available. Do you care about having the various operating systems and versions of IE available, or do you only care about working with the various versions of IE?

The virtual machines may be downloaded here.