Described herein are methods and systems for providing software development services according to an execution environment specified in the requests. For instance, instead of performing compilation on a stand-alone desktop computer, software development activities including, compilation are performed by a service provider in response to a general query from a client requester. Service provider avoids computing results each time a request is received by maintaining a cache of results. To ensure that stored results are compatible to results that can be obtained by re-computation, results are computed according to a specified execution environment. The execution environment for computing is first created on a virtual machine on which aspects of the environment such as a specific version of an operating system and software development tool are established. The execution environment is then saved and invoked on a virtual machine during computation of results for software development requests.