Web developers - Is it better to do development on your local machine or on a remote host?

Question

What are the pro/cons of doing web development on your local machine rather than on a centralized development server? For those that do dev on your local machine, how do you kee

Answer 1

In my current position, I develop on my own machine. For smaller projects I just use the lightweight web server that ships with Visual Studio. I also have SQL Server 2005 and 2008 set up on my own machine for development and initial testing purposes.

This has worked well for me on the whole; the one issue I've run into is (as others have noted) keeping the databases in sync is kind of a pain. I've recently moved to migrator dot net -- basically a .NET take on Ruby on Rails migrations -- for keeping the local/staging/uat/production databases in sync, and it's making my life much less stressful. A tool like this also makes it easier to work on the database in a team environment, although you must be disciplined enough to use it consistently.

My experiences here have convinced me that local development combined with some sort of db change control process, a continuous integration server, and a good version control system that supports merging (we use TFS) is the best way to go. That lets everyone do their own thing without stepping on someone else, but also makes sure the changes get merged properly.

In my previous job we used IIS on our PCs combined with a dedicated development database and this was a bit of a PITA -- you had to be careful not to run any processes that might take down the database or even mess up the data because it might impact other developers, and IMO, that kind of defeated the purpose of having a development DB in the first place.