Using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 VPCs

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:

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.

1326

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 27, 2007
    After i download VSCTPBase.exe(1.2GB) and tried to extract that file i get below errors: Extracting Base01.vhd CRC failed in Base01.vhd Unexpected end of archive ????

  • Anonymous
    July 30, 2007
    Is this the same image as the one required by the Beta 1 VPC?

  • Anonymous
    July 31, 2007
    Brian Harry on An interesting Agile viewport into TFS and Team System Web Access Power Tool Available....

  • Anonymous
    August 01, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2007
    Hi, Didn't you have any problems logging on the Team Foundation Server's VPC? Unfortunatelly neither the supplied password (P2ssw0rd), neither the earlier used Pass@word1 are accepted for me. Cheers, krank

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2007
    That was the original idea, but in practice it doesn't work. After I downloaded both, I merged the virtual disks, defragmented, ran Invirtus VM Optimizer, and then ran the VPC compactor. That got the merged disks from 15GB down to 6.2GB. When I used WinRAR to compress that at Maximum, I got it down to less that 2GB. Microsoft needs to not use the differencing disks anymore and just do full installations, and then optimize the VMs and compress them.