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.