Just as curious as everybody else I went for for the VS 2005 beta. Had to take some bumps to get it up and running, these are some things I learned:
- You're not the only one trying to download it. Download speed varies dramatically. Starts at 400/500 K, soon drops to a fraction of that and eventually the stream will stop. In the MSDN downloader you can set the number of retries. By default this is 3 which is not enough to complete the download. You can change the number of retries while running, but this number won't be active untill you restart.
- Virtual PC will not accept the downloaded ISO image.
- Nero imagedrive can load the image but the setup fails on that virtual drive.
- You can burn the image to a physical disk. Setup fails again
- And again the Daemon tools virtual DVD drive (freeware !) works like a snap. The drive is recognized by Virtual PC as DVD drive. After this the install is flawless.
And now I can start with the serious work. Provided the VS 2003 produduction project has some time to spare. I have to write tons of plumbing code which VS 2005 would generate for me on the fly. The future is bright...