I honestly don't understand why anyone would develop on Win and release on Linux, especially for a web-app.
VMWare Player and VirtualBox are free, and it's quite easy to setup an Ubuntu image that mimics your server platform (if you must be untethered)... alternatively put everything in the (private, if need be) cloud.
Pretty simply: I prefer the Windows environment to Linux. I don't like GNOME or KDE. I also don't really like the OS X environment, either. (My day job requires a Unix machine because our codebase is fragile, and it's a source of some annoyance.)
For my own projects, I would rather work in Windows, with a mild annoyance when testing, than consistently be annoyed by working in either. (I do use a VM for testing before pushing to production, but for quick "is this right" testing, bouncing Django on Windows and eyeballing it is generally good enough to keep pushing forward.)
I realize that, and like I said, I do for final testing. It's enough of a roadblock to rapid development for me to avoid it until I have to make sure it will work on the platform. (VMware shared folders don't always play nicely, so I end up just pushing via hg.)
I've been developing in a similar environment for over a year now. I have a linux VM running apache + associated software, with Samba running. I mount my code as a shared drive, and edit it that way. This means I get the power of linux + linux tools, but I can still run Windows as my primary OS.
I am perfectly happy with this setup, and haven't run across any downsides.
I've seen it done for years in a reasonably sized team. It actually works really well in a fulltime scenario on a large project, on decent desktop boxes in an office environment.
Developers appreciated that significant config changes boiled down to: get all of your local changes into version control, then grab the newest VM image off the network drive.
It's significantly more painful when you get out of that environment. If you have lots of projects, juggling VMs is a pain. They take up lots of space. Spinning them up/down takes minutes. You don't just have one working IP/hostname/Samba mount/etc that's always there. The resource hit from running a VM is a bigger deal on a netbook. Etc..
I'm with you on this, but there's no need to even do it with vmare. Development boxes don't get slammed like servers, you can throw CentOS or whatever on a headless "junk" PC you found while dumpster diving, and upload your code to it for testing/development.
Hell, that's what I do and my main Desktop does run Linux, but I devel on a junk machine running Apache/PHP, PostgreSQL.
VMWare Player and VirtualBox are free, and it's quite easy to setup an Ubuntu image that mimics your server platform (if you must be untethered)... alternatively put everything in the (private, if need be) cloud.