Brennan’s Blog

There are many events coming up where you can get a free Visual Studio 2008 installation. These events have filled up quickly, as Dave Bost explains. You can get a 90 day trial for Visual Studio 2008 from MSDN right now but when you get the fully licensed version you will need to uninstall the trial. The special installations for these events, however, do not require the uninstall which is a good reason to get into one of these events. But before you attend one of these "installfest" events you will want to prepare your computer with the following tips.

I personally make use of Virtual PC for all of my development environments. When I use any Beta releases I isolate them to a separate VPC image while leaving my currently active environment untouched. It allows me to avoid all of the messy and time consuming uninstalls that are often necessary when the final releases arrive. That is what I did in this case. I strongly suggest trying out doing your development in a VPC. All modern computers have hardware assisted virtualization. You may be quite happy with the performance. I do not even notice the difference anymore.

While doing my VPC installation of Visual Studio 2008 I did run into a minor problem that I would like others to avoid. Since I created an archive copy of my Vista VPC shortly after creating the fresh installation it was not current with the latest updates and Vista was configured to automatically start pulling them down. It would be best to get all of the latest updates and install them before starting the Visual Studio 2008 installation. In my case the Vista updates downloading in the background likely slowed my installation. It also helps to defrag your hard drive. I have the defrag utility scheduled to run nightly on my system.

Finally, if you intend to install VisualSVN like I do, you will want to get the latest update which has fixes for running with Visual Studio 2008. Beyond my tips, you will also want to read more tips from Jon Galloway.