As part of my parting duties for a job I’m leaving I have been asked to set up a virtual environment with all of the projects requiring older platforms. This is something most developers have a virtual machine for, but sharing one across the company makes a lot more sense. It’s something we had intended to do for some time but just never got around to.

In doing this, I had to consult our software stockpile to find the old CDs of Visual Studio 2002 (it was originally just called Visual Studio .NET). Since my new-format MSDN subscription doesn’t allow me to download the ISOs of this directly, I was tasked with create an image of each of the CDs so they could easily be mounted on the server (there’s no physical optical drive).

Creating an ISO should be something that Windows has native support for now, but it doesn’t. So I set about finding the best easy, quick and free solution I could.

I came up with ISO Recorder.

It’s quick to install, it’s free, it doesn’t require a reboot and it makes the process as easy as selecting the drive, right clicking and creating an ISO. It’s rare nowadays that we find such laser-beam focus in software without bloated options. But this did exactly what I needed to do and did it quickly. For that, it gets a mention on my blog.