Why so much grief about this. This is simple make a permalink to your development box or a box that is always on using something like dyndns and its little client. Then you RDP from any computer you want and work on your projects that way.
This is much simpler than lugging anything around with you. The development stuff could still be VM on the host you are RDPing into allowing you to turn it on and off when needed. The other nice thing about doing it this way is that you are not at risk of losing anything.
Personally I would not use the bootable disk just to much hassel in killing the current OS and booting up, depending on hardware of the random computer you are on access to the outside world might be hit or miss.
