Sometimes you just have to try something, even though you can’t imagine that it will work. Usually, the result is slight disappointment that the software didn’t anticipate what you wanted to do, but occasionally the process yields pure joy. Virtual PC just gave me such joy.
I have a virtual machine running on my right-hand monitor, and I needed to get a file from my physical workstation over to it. I haven’t yet set up any shared drives, so I wasn’t sure of the best way to get the file over—in this case a VS 2008 settings file. First I tried to open explorer on the physical machine, select the file and copy it, then paste it into an explorer window on the virtual machine. I actually expected this to work and it didn’t. Then I paused and wondered if I could drag the file onto the virtual machine. Sure enough, you can!
I dragged a file out of an explorer window on my physical machine into a window on the virtual machine, and the file was copied over for me. Beautiful!