I
recently discovered how hard it is to spare some time for blog writing.
I spend a lot of time writing emails though. And this is my first
mail-to-blogger experience. If it works good, it’s definitely a great
tool!
Yesterday I tried the September CTP of Visual Studio 2006 aka Orcas. I had to install VirtualPC to begin with, that went good.
In
order to download the entire image which was around 3,4Gb, I think, I
needed a download manager. Because the speed was terribly slow from
Microsoft.
I wrote a quick download manager of my own. Using a .net Bits wrapper I found on MSDN.
What
a great experience! In 30 minutes a had a fully functional download
manager with resuming functions and background downloading and loads of
other stuff. I’ve already got two colleagues signed up for the first
beta :p
Back to the topic.
When
it came to booting the image I was missing the Base01.vhd. It turned
out I also needed the base OS image which wasn’t included.
After downloading that too (1.x Gb) I was ready to go.
To
make a long story short; I was disappointed. There was no new templates
or installed components for .Net 3.X in Orcas. Just a System.Core.dll,
which I had to reference, in %Windows%\Microsoft.Net\3.5…\. It allowed
me to use a few objects such as QueryExpression. They could at least
have supplied a sample project.
I was expecting too much, apparently.