Web accessible Virtual Windows Environment for Collaborative testing of code

[questorfla]

Not sure where the best place to look for this would be.  Maybe AZURE or maybe Google? 

Does anyone know of a not too expensive setup that would offer a web accessed VM running a Windows environment for testing code snippets that can accessed by more than one person simultaneously for collaboration on the project?  I have found a few applications that appear to offer such for commercial development but nothing that seems to be a small and affordable setup for 'personal use'.

This is for an alternative to simply allowing all the users to simply connect via Interviewer or other to a single host system.  Which is the first thing I thought of and may be the only viable option.

[Shades]

Some food for thought:
You usually need to rent your internet connection, then rent the room on whatever cloud hosting service you prefer, then pay for the licensed copy of whatever version of Windows you want to run in the cloud, then either spend time installing Windows at the cloud host or pay to have them do it for you. Then you need to get licensed copies of any software you want to use on the cloud computer and spend time uploading & installing & configuring these.

If you want to use a non-Server edition of Windows in combination with the RDP protocol (the most commonly used protocol)...you have the problem of only one person being able to connect to this cloud PC at any given moment (the last person that logs in automatically kicks out the previously logged in user). Server editions of Windows allow more than one RDP connections simultaneously. Be sure to have this part also covered with sufficient (extra) licenses from Microsoft.

And even if you did all that, it is still very likely you'll need to run specific collaboration software to allow more than one person to work on the same file(s) at the same time. Don't expect collaboration tools for anything else than Office documents to be cheap. Tools such as Atlassian's Confluence might be a good start for you.

My personal experiences with working on cloud-based PCs through Paraguayan ISP's aren't stellar. To have a better experience, make sure your internet connection has a very high upload speed, else your workflow is (significantly) slower than you would expect. Standard internet connections with high download limits are cheap, because these usually don't allow for fast uploads. ISP's usually do offer connections with high upload speeds, but at (much) higher cost.

Running software like the Interviewer tool you mention locally is a lot less (technical & financial) hassle. Especially if this whole collaboration thing you suggest is not used that often. Fast, Good, Cheap...choose two and hope those two are delivered as promised all the time (which isn't a given, I'm afraid).

[questorfla]

Shades,i can always count on you to keep me grounded
The other party also tossed that back at me.  Cost.

Shame, but no big deal to setup the collaboration on a laptop.
Don't want to crash my day-to-day testing web-code. 
And I am not that well acquainted with the person who is assisting me so...
Easy fix.  Plenty of old laptop laying around.

Thanks.
I had to ask though.

[wraith808]

What language are you testing?

[questorfla]

html mostly  PHP MySQL etc
still trying to embed a simple PDF viewer on an OLD software code

[wraith808]

html mostly  PHP MySQL etc
still trying to embed a simple PDF viewer on an OLD software code

I was thinking since you said Azure in your original, you were doing .NET or some other managed code.

There are cheap alternatives for what you're trying to do.

I personally use Koding.

There's also Nitrous

There are several others out there, so what you want is doable, it's just up to you to decide what you want to use.

[questorfla]

Thanks Wraith! 
I knew somebody here would know a way.  I just popped open Koding for a sec and it looked promising so Nitrous probably will too.  The person I a working right now is in Europe so any way that would allow collaborative testing is fine with me.