Can you boot a MacBookPro from an external hard drive with Windows XP?

I'm planning on getting a MacBookPro with a 512GB Solid State drive.
Is there any chance I would be able to find a way to boot from an external drive that has Windows XP installed.
Why would I want to do that you ask? I want to travel with my Mac, but have access to certain programs(AutoCad2010 & 3dMax)that are supplied on my Employer supplied computer without carting it around too... it's a "brick." I know there are Mac versions of AutoCad and 3Dmax, but my employer won't supply me with them. (They are not smart enough to recognize the productivity benifits of Macs.) I thought it would be great to take the Hard drive, put it in a USB or Firewire case and just boot up from that. Probably just a crazy idea, but maybe some clever person knows a way?

Windows XP will neither install nor run on an external drive. However, your boot volume is more than large enough to accommodate a Boot Camp partition in which to run Windows. Or you can purchase Parallels or VM Fusion to run Windows in a virtual machine. Problem solved.

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