VirtualBox is an excellent tool to run one or many virtual Windows machines on a Linux host. Its shared folders offer convenient access to the host file system from the virtual machines. However, shared folders may not be suitable for specialized tasks such as storing .NET application-level Office addins. In this article I describe an alternative way to share folders between the host and guest operating systems using the Samba file server.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.xltoolbox.net/blog/2013/11/local-file-sharing-with-samba-and-virtualbox-guests.html