Windows Testing

This guide is designed for:

This is like VNC but for windows.

To configure the AMI:

Any instance type should be fine, but ideally use an instance type with High network performance like m3.xlarge because you'll be using remote desktop to connect to the instance.
Choose Next: Configure Instance Details
Accept defaults for Step 3: Configure Instance Details and Step 4: Add Storage
For Step 5: Tag Instance give the instance a name like yourname/windows-studio-testing
Then click Review and Launch, then Launch

Grab the public DNS via the instance listing:

Create a new "RDP Desktop" configuration
User is Administrator and Password is Plato1234 (this is pre-configured by https://github.com/mapbox/cfn-ci/blob/windows/ami/cfn-ami-win2012-vs2014.template#L46)
Put the public DNS address into the PC Name field
Save the configuration
Click it to start the machine

Note: every time you restart this instance you'll need to edit this config with the new ip address but the credentials will stay the same.

Note, for windows ami's not created by cfn-ci the password will be different, but you can fetch it from the AWS console:

By default the Remote Desktop will open in full screen view. It's usually better to disable full screen and instead use scaled mode. Do this by:
Choosing Window > Full Screen to disable full screen mode
Choosing Window > Scaling to enable scaling mode
Hitting the command (or ⌘) toggles between the desktop view and the "start" screen
Ctrl or command click may not work to emulate a mouse right-click so use a two-finger tap to bring up contextual menus on windows.
There are two ways to open a terminal, one is:
- Open the File Explorer by clicking on the folder icon pinned to the taskbar
- Then, within a given directory, press shift + two-finger tap and then choose Open command window here
- Then type cd c:\ to get to the root of the drive
The other way is to use powershell:
- Click the powershell icon icon pinned to the taskbar
- Within the powershell terminal type cmd
Copy and paste between OSX and the remote desktop should work. If not try rebooting the instance just by shutting it down and restarting it in the AWS console.

You'll likely want to install chrome, download studio, then test.

For more involved testing you can install sublime text for windows. See the gochas below for more tips

You will see a certificate warning when first connecting via RDP - this is normal
Only one person can log into a machine at once using RDP. So, if you get logged out all of a sudden, try logging back in and you'll kick off the person that previously bumped you.
Even after modifying the IE security settings I found it impossible to download Google Chrome via IE. The Chrome download pages uses some javascript:void(0) trick that may be the breakage - or politics. Either way my workaround was to 1) download the windows version via my local OS X machine (https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/?platform=win), 2) grab the URL manually from the chrome downloads page (chrome://downloads/), and then copy n paste that into IE.
You may need to install software that requires a reboot. No problem: it is safe to restart the instance and the data will be persisted (as long as you just stop the instance and do not terminate it).

TODO:

Provide feedback