Microsoft has succeeded in making my life just a little more difficult. No, this is not gonna be an M$ sucks rant, but for f**k's sake, they could take down the CTP version of VS 2010 who's trial expired in January, and give us an updated version.

Downloading took a few hours, and was not what I expected. After getting 10 700 MB parts and an 11th 258 MB part (roughly), I extracted it as needed, and found myself staring at a *.vhd file and a *.vmc file. So, no, this is not just a standard beta download and install dealio, you have to go get Virtual PC as well. After installing that, you then get to set up the vmc and start it up. Then, you get to realize that you can't login to the Team Server, because you don't know the passwords to any of the four accounts it has. So, you go back online, and find them after a Google search or two. After finally logging into the VPC, you can start up VS 2010, only to find out that you have to upgrade, as the evaluation period is over. So what now? After a few more google searches, you come across some XML code that needs to be put into the vmc file to de-sync the clock, then restart the VPC and change the time. This was my overall process. Don't thank me, you're welcome for saving you the middle steps I took.

However, once you do get VS 2010 to work, it is a quite pleasant experience. The start screen was user friendly, and it got me into a project fairly quickly. This is still a pre-beta, and there are defenitly a few quirky things here and there, but it was nice none the less.

I have not really gotten any further from trying to write a few lines of code. It was very slow, but this was probably due to the face that it was being run on a virtual PC.

By the way, As far as I have read, you need a Business edition or higher of XP or Vista to run virtual PC.

I'll let you know as I look into more features