Visual Studio and exe files

[walker01642]

We have a policy of not allowing students to save or run .exe files on our network. Unfortunately last year as part of 'A' Level IT we now have to allow certain students to program in Visual Studio. This means that we have to allow these students to create .exe files as part of their projects. Sure enough our fears were well-founded and we have found that some students are now running 'other' programs such as license key finders, wireless password finders etc. Has anybody found out a way of allowing students to run programming languages for their course without needing to save or run .exe files

[jcollings]

We have a policy of not allowing students to save or run .exe files on our network. Unfortunately last year as part of 'A' Level IT we now have to allow certain students to program in Visual Studio. This means that we have to allow these students to create .exe files as part of their projects. Sure enough our fears were well-founded and we have found that some students are now running 'other' programs such as license key finders, wireless password finders etc. Has anybody found out a way of allowing students to run programming languages for their course without needing to save or run .exe files

 

We had similar issues so we built them virtual PCs. These images sit on the classroom PC and they do all their programming etc within the virtual machine. They can run exes etc on that unrestricted. The virtual PC doesn't have a network card and is set up to undo any changes at the end of each session.

 

They can save to a flash drive to keep work but then not run the exes on the normal school computers.

 

Seems to work well although to be honest many of our A level students just bring in their own laptops for the programming bits of the course.

[6Foot2]

We have a similar situation. I have solved it by creating virtual machines which the students run up through their normal domain logons.

 

The user on the virtual machine has a tied down desktop [but not too tied down so that they can't usefully do their coursework. The virtual machine network card is disabled and the virtual machine is not part of the network [naturally as there is no way to contact the network]

 

Students logon locally with a local windows user [limited privileges]

 

Updating of the virtual machine has to be carried out by the local administrator.

 

Work created inside the virtual environment is dragged out of the virtual machine and saved to MyDocuments [Network]

 

Upon shutting down the virtual machine all changes made by the local student user are lost and the station is returned to the pre-logon state.

 

Hope this is clear [it is late and I am a little tired: Long day]

[6Foot2]

We had similar issues so we built them virtual PCs. These images sit on the classroom PC and they do all their programming etc within the virtual machine. They can run exes etc on that unrestricted. The virtual PC doesn't have a network card and is set up to undo any changes at the end of each session.

 

They can save to a flash drive to keep work but then not run the exes on the normal school computers.

 

Seems to work well although to be honest many of our A level students just bring in their own laptops for the programming bits of the course.

 

Blast! Beat me to it.

[walker01642]

Thanks for the reply. We are looking at this. Do you use Virtual PC 2007? If so how do you get it to see USB pen drives?

[6Foot2]

Thanks for the reply. We are looking at this. Do you use Virtual PC 2007? If so how do you get it to see USB pen drives?

 

Virtual PC Details: Microsoft Virtual PC 6.0.156.0

 

USB content: Enable Virtual PC Additions and then you can drag items from outside the Virtual PC Environment into it.

[rh91uk]

You could use SunVirtualBox

 

VirtualBox