Hehe, if I tried to have that conversation with my wife, she would say, "Aren't 8 hard drives enough?" 

Dang if she doesn't know her way around the computer

LOL

Thanks everyone for their input. 

A couple of friends are running the vs2008 CTP on a box with VS2005 so figured I'd give it a try and as the man falling from the top of a 20 story building was heard to say as he passed the 10th floor ... So far, so good

But have patience, Ivan, since when the release VS2008 comes out this will be my excuse to get a new laptop.  ( My wife asks, "New computer?  What's wrong with the old one?"  "It's full."  "Oh, ok." )

But I have also received enough good advice I am going to start playing with this virtual machine stuff. 

Thanks again.  See you all in Amarillo in December.

After all this I guess I won't get any used machine from Charles anymore...

I love Virtual PC 2007, gone are the days of having anything but production stuff on my development machine and having to maintain any test boxes.



I have .VHD files for clean installs of XP (SP1, SP2, and with and without IE7 for web development), Server 2000, Server 2003, Server 2008. Its great, I can load a box the way Iwant it, save the VHD file as a snapshot of the current state, play around till my heart is full, then when you wan to go back just overlay the virtual hard drive files, its that easy !!!!




Keith Chisarik

Charles

I agree with everyone 110%. I will never load another "test" product onto my real machine, I got all messed up with the CTP for 2005, It did not uninstall properly and once I installed the retail version and I was unable to get the it to install correctly to make a very very long story short I ended up having to format and reload everything to just get Visual Studio to work on that box. Trust me you want to take about wasted time!!

Hey Charles,

Using Virtual Machines is a great way to test new products and to test YOUR products before releasing to customers.  You can save hard drive states and get them back to a particular state extremely fast.  You can also save your hard drive at different states and revert back to that state and then try again.  If you are planning on setting up a virtual machine, I would use VMware instead of the Virtual PC.  I am a huge Microsoft fan and love their products, and Virtual PC is OK, but it is slow.  VMWare is much faster and has a lot more features as it relates to incremental drive states, etc.  Virtual PC 2007 added the incremental drive states, but it is still not as fast as VMWare.  Microsoft also has another product that is Virtual Server that basically does the same thing from a server allow multiple computers to access the same OS on the virtual server...however, it is a bit more complicated (not much) and is still not as fast as VMWare.

I highly recommend setting up a virtual machine.  Just so that you can see what it does and how it works, load the Virtual PC since you already have this for free through an MSDN subscription, load an OS and don't activate the OS, and try it out.  This would be my suggested method of loading VS2008.

Well, yes, you will need to install an OS and everything required to run the CTP on the Virtual PC. As someone has already pointed out to you, it would be safer to uninstall a Virtual PC than unistall the VS CTP from your current working installation.

Once you install Virtual PC on your machine, you will get a console where you will be able to create new machines, there is a wizard for that. After created, you start the process of installing OS and so. After you get one virtual machine up and running, you can even copy it to a new one, and use the copy to make all your tests... if you mess it up, just delete this machine and make another copy of the original one, that will save you lots of time.

But I won't argue with you, buying a new box will probably save you some time now, you can even go further and buy new ones if anything goes wrong... I will send you my address if you need to dispose of some of them...

Yeah, I actually downloaded the MS version.  Am I correct in understanding that I need install an operating system (want to use XP again) before I can use it?  What about my SQL Server?

I'm sure it is not all as complicated as it seems, but I also am nervous about installing a second Windows XP on this box just to run one piece of software.  Given the time involved and billable hours lost I would think it would be cheaper just to buy another box to install it on.

Or is there a quick and easy way to do this?  Suggestions definitely appreciated.

( also would still like to know if anyone knows if there is a problem running the CTP while running the vs2005.  I have read that VS 2005 doesn't have problems with .net 3.5 )

Hi Charles.

Have you considered setting up a Virtual Machine for that?