Since IE 7 went live last month (the English localization started going out over automatic update from mid-November) and with Windows Vista poised for general roll-out, you might find Pete LePage’s blog posting useful.

Pete’s a Product Manager on the Microsoft IE 7 team and his posting shows how to set up your Windows XP box to allow you to simulataneously test your markup on both IE 6 and IE 7 (and earlier versions, too, should you choose to). It uses a free virtualisation tool called Virtual PC 2004 to achieve the desired result.

The virtualisation tool won’t work for Windows Vista users. If that’s you, then you can try using the beta of Virtual PC 2007, that’s available through the Connect program to achieve the same result.

Since IE 6 and IE 7 each have their own collection of interesting bugs, quirks and standards non-compliance I think Pete’s given a really useful tip for anyone working on the web since it saves you from having to use two different machines for testing purposes. I’m going to install it now.