Vagrant and Virtualbox made me rethink about issues of developping webapp on Windows. I mostly do Windows dev and sometimes I also do some webdev, so I can't switch everything to MacOS or Linux.

I'm just starting to use Vagrant, and I think that it's an awesome solution. Vagrant allows to manage headless virtual machine (VM without UI ). I have a headless VirtualBox right now and it uses 48Mo. I could easily run tens of them.

You can share folders with the host and serve files from the virtual machine in a completly prod like environnement. You can also isolate projects in separated machines. For those who think that a unix box is closer to prod think of how many conflicts you can have with tons of libs installed on the same laptop : python, ruby, php, node.js, mysql, mongodb, etc... It is really different from a prod machine anyway. And Virtualbox works better (faster ) on Windows because the shared folder implementation of VirtualBox is better on Windows ;).

I'm not sure how it will turn out for me as I'm not very far in this process, but it seems to be awesome for the moment.