Windows Vista Beta 1 - Trillions and Trillions Served

Bytes, that is…  By now, many thousands of you have successfully downloaded Windows Vista Beta 1 from MSDN Subscriber Downloads.  We’re pleased with your interest and appreciate your support – you’ve made this the top download of any product offered from MSDN Subscriber Downloads in its first week – ever!   For those of you that may have been hindered by slow connection speeds or are instead waiting patiently to receive your September media shipment, they are literally being manufactured as I type these remarks and will ship to media subscribers later this month.

 

Windows Vista Beta 1 caps a long list of content that we’ve been making available to you first on MSDN Subscriber Downloads.  In just the past month, MSDN Subscriptions has brought you the first phased set of Visual Studio 2005 July Community Technology Preview releases, starting with Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition CTP in early July, a mid-July drop of Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition CTP, Visual SourceSafe 2005 CTP, and Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office CTP, and finally, last week’s drop of Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite CTP and Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server CTP.

 

And if that wasn’t enough, MSDN Subscriber Downloads is now hosting a VPC image of Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2.  This is the same VPC that was distributed at TechEd 2005 and represents a clean install of Windows Server 2003 with Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2 fully installed and configured.  It’s our first VPC image that we’ve made available and we look forward to bringing more to you in the future to help simplify your testing requirements.

 

With Vista Beta 1 garnering most of the attention, and something for everyone recently delivered by the Visual Studio team, you’ll want to be sure to revisit the site and pick up one or more to go for your summertime enjoyment.

 

Of course, no mention of Visual Studio 2005 would be complete without mentioning the new Visual Studio and MSDN Subscription offerings coming later this year.  For those of you receiving media shipments, watch your August media shipment for a special insert providing additional information on the changes and Web links to help you understand more about upcoming changes and benefits.  It’s an exciting time to be an MSDN subscriber.  Enjoy!

 

Regards,

 

Seth Adams

Program Manager, MSDN Subscriptions