I spent a large part of the last two days installing the newest Visual Studio 2005 Beta. This was quite a long process!
- First of all, I’m using Virtual Machines (VMWare’s equivalent to Microsoft’s Virtual PC) so I had to get an XP VM image working.
- Then I had to spend several hours getting my XP image upgraded with Service Pack 2 (required for VS2005) and all the latest security fixes.
- Then I had to install and format a new hard drive in the VM because VS2005 requires 2.6 GB free and my XP VM had far less than that available on its C: drive (SQL Server 2000 is also installed). Oddly enough, VS2005 required free space on my C: drive even through I was installing onto the E: drive. In fact, VS2005 Beta 2 required 870 MB free on C: and 1.7 Gb on E: – and this is without MSDN!
- Once I had enough free space on the C: drive, I ran the install program and let it go for hours unattended. When I came back, one component I had selected failed to install – SQL Server 2005 CTP. I’d run out of disk space with 122 Mb still free! Since I’ve got SQL Server 2000 installed, I’m not worried about that just yet.
Now I’m ready to do some ASP.Net 2.0 work! I’m fairly excited. I’ve got my Dino Esposito ASP.Net 2.0 book ready and I’m looking forward to creating my first website that uses a membership database. I’m going to base my work off of Michael’s recent presentation.
I also wanted to give credit where credit is due – I’m using a piece of software called Alcohol 52% to mount ISO disk images as usable DVD-ROMs. My laptop doesn’t have a DVD burner and I can’t really be bothered to copy the 2.85 Gb disk image file I downloaded from MSDN to the machine that does. I don’t really need a physical copy of beta software. What Alcohol 52% (free 30 day trial) allows me to do is use the ISO disk image file as if it were a real CD or DVD. I can even share it and use it inside of my Virtual Machine. That’s a nice bit of functionality and it really cuts down on the amount of disks I need to carry with me from place to place.
— Matt Ranlett