By now, I hope you've heard of the newest project we launched at Microsoft called <a href="http://www.modern.ie/">modern.IE</a>. I'm not going to go into every aspect of the site as I really want to focus on the VMs for this post. But if you want the details you can check out these great blog posts:

<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/02/01/modern-ie-a-new-set-of-tools-to-help-test-web-site-compatibility.aspx">modern.IE – A new set of tools to help test web site compatibility</a>
<a href="http://blogs.windows.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2013/01/31/introducing-modern-ie-testing-sites-for-internet-explorer-made-easier.aspx">Introducing modern.IE – Testing sites for Internet Explorer made easier</a>

<h2>The New Way to get IE VMs</h2>

Up until now, if you wanted to test different versions of IE natively you had to <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11575">download VPC images</a> that would allow you to run virtual machines for the different versions of IE. It wasn't a great solution because:
<ul>
	<li>They were designed to be run in Microsoft's Virtual PC software making it hard for non-Windows developers to use them.</li>
	<li>They were broken apart into multiple, large download files</li>
</ul>

There were ways to use them on other OSes but <a href="http://tumblr.jonthornton.com/post/11405634980/how-to-run-microsofts-ie-vpc-images-in-virtualbox">it required some work</a> or <a href="https://github.com/xdissent/ievms">unofficial scripts to convert them</a>. Either way, the IE VPCs weren't very easy or convenient to use.

We wanted to make this easier so as part of the modern.IE project, we <a href="http://www.modern.ie/virtualization-tools">created a new set of VMs</a> that targeted your OS and your VM-specific software. Now, you'll be able to choose your OS:

<a href="http://blog.reybango.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/vm-os.png"><img src="http://blog.reybango.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/vm-os-300x178.png" alt="vm-os" width="300" height="178" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1963" /></a>

then choose the VM software:

<a href="http://blog.reybango.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/vm-soft.png"><img src="http://blog.reybango.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/vm-soft-300x179.png" alt="vm-soft" width="300" height="179" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1964" /></a>

and download the VM with the version(s) of IE you'd like to install:

<a href="http://blog.reybango.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/vm-vms.png"><img src="http://blog.reybango.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/vm-vms-300x120.png" alt="vm-vms" width="300" height="120" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1965" /></a>



