Every once in a while you find yourself on a project that doesn't have all the resources you'd like to have and you start falling behind with respect to the tooling and SDK versions being used.

In this case I'm working on a project that is running Azure SDK 1.6 and we're primarily developing the application using Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7. The IT department has prompted an upgrade to Windows 8 and I was hoping to be able to leapfrog several upgrades and go straight to Azure SDK 2.0 and Visual Studio 2012. Unfortunately this didn't work so well and after the long process of installing the new OS, new tooling and attempting to upgrade the project due to the breaking changes in Azure storage SDKs I find myself looking for a better process to test technology upgrades in a way that leaves flexibility for the team to upgrade their current environment or rebuild it as quickly as possible to minimize developer downtime.