Planet SCM

If you'd like an overview of what you'll find in Visual Studio 2008, you should download a copy of the following white paper, which was updated for the Beta 2 release. It is available as a Word document, PDF, or XPS.

This white paper provides an overview of Visual Studio 2008 and how it delivers key advances in the following areas:

• Improve Developer Productivity
• Manage the Application Life Cycle
• Employ the Latest Technologies

 

Source: Visual Studio 2008 Overview White Paper

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I know how it is. You find the download page you're seeking and you immediately scan the page to find the cherished Download button. For this reason, I always advise teams not to rely on download page content to ensure customer success with the download.

As a case in point, if you downloaded one of the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 VPCs, and now you're cursing us because of this message in the error log:

"OrcasBeta2_VSTS" could not be started because a disk-related error occurred.

You may have understandably overlooked the second item of Required Software on the download page:

• Visual Studio Code Name Orcas Base Image: contains the OS and is a one-time download for all the Virtual PC images that lay on top of it.

That's right. The Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 VPCs require the Visual Studio Code Name Orcas Base Image. The Beta 2 VPCs are differencing disks, not self-contained VPCs. The idea behind this is that you'd download one base image for use throughout the entire Visual Studio 2008 prerelease period and we'd be able to make smaller downloads of differencing disks.

I apologize for the inconvenience, and I'll be adding this nugget of info to the Visual Studio 2008 Downloads page today.

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If you'd like a jump on getting the prerequisites in place while you're downloading the bits, you can download the latest version of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Installation Guide. Since Beta 1 is still available for download, you'll see two versions of the guide on this download page. v70725 is the Beta 2 edition.

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Psst! Looking for an easier way to download those huge Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 files? Go grab the Microsoft Secure Content Downloader from Microsoft Research.

All you have to do is pick your favorite flavor of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and tell it where to save it.

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See Soma's post for the details: Announcing the release of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, .NET FX 3.5 Beta 2, and Silverlight 1.0 RC

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If you don't already follow Sara Ford's blog, you really should subscribe to her Visual Studio 2008 Tip of the Day. She'll enlighten you daily with nuggets of good info about Visual Studio 2008. For Visual Studio 2005, she ran a Visual Studio 2005 Tip of the Week that was an excellent resource.

It’s that time again… but notice this time it is “tip of the day.”  That’s right.  For Visual Studio 2008, I’m going to attempt to post a tip every day of the work week. Yeah, tip of the day doesn’t work on weekends. =)

Source: Sara Ford's WebLog : Introducing Visual Studio 2008 Tip of the Day

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When you download and install Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, you may notice that some of the product names have changed for this release. On the Help menu in Team Suite, click About and you'll find that many of the products in Team System have a new name.

Since we released Visual Studio 2005, we’ve heard from you that the capabilities of each of the team editions don’t always map to the way you define roles in your organizations. To simplify the naming and respond to this feedback, we’ve renamed the team editions to remove specific role names. Of course, this doesn’t mean we’re changing Team System’s charter – it’s still designed to help everyone on the team collaborate together through integrated tools, processes, and guidance.

Below is a list of the name changes compared to what they were in Visual Studio 2005.

However, the names for the rest of the Visual Studio product line are unchanged except for the version change.

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Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group on Friday, April 27th from 10:00 - 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time to discuss features available in Visual Studio Team System. In addition, discuss what's new in the Visual Studio code name “Orcas” Beta 1 releases for Team Suite and Team Foundation Server.

Add to Calendar | Additional Time Zones | Join the Chat

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It appears that the ISO images for Visual Studio code name "Orcas" Beta 1 are now showing up on MSDN Subscriber Downloads.

The ISO image for Team Suite should appear anytime now.

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For those are downloading Visual Studio code name "Orcas" Beta 1 files from Microsoft Downloads, you may have seen what appears to be a misprint:

I can assure you that the Team Foundation Server with Team Suite VPC is much larger than 9 KB total and that we're not using a compression technology from an advanced alien civilization.

To make a long story short, we sometimes have the need to shortcut our publishing system to publish some of these really large files in a timely manner. To do so, we need to put placeholder files for each file expected in the download. In this case, the placeholders are only 1 KB. Since the file size displayed comes from the files that go through the system, you're seeing 1 KB when in fact these are 700 MB volumes of a self-extracting file.

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See Soma's blog for the details, and the MSDN Visual Studio Futures site for the bits to download.

Orcas Beta 1 bits for the various different product SKUs will be available at the MSDN Visual Studio Futures site over the next day or so. The team and I are looking forward to hearing your feedback on Beta1.

Source: Somasegar's WebLog : Visual Studio "Orcas" and .NET FX 3.5 Beta1 shipped!

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