Drewby

Our team just launched a new video podcast called 10-4 that will cover the new features in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

Episode 1: Downloading and Using the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP

For this first episode of 10-4, we’ll look at how to download and use the Virtual PC image of the Visual Studio 2010 September CTP. We’ll give you tips on how to download this massive (7GB+ compressed) VPC, show you how to get past some pesky expiration issues, and get you started with the CTP walkthroughs. Lastly we’ll cover where to get assistance and provide your feedback about this release.

In future episodes we’ll dive more deeply into the technical underpinnings of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, but for this first episode we wanted to make sure everybody could get the CTP and follow along at home.

If you have ideas for the show or topics that you want covered, please let us know! We’ll be releasing one episode a week. You can provide your feedback in the comments of the show or email us at 10-4 at microsoft.com.

If you’ve used the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC over the last several days, you probably have noticed the warnings about the end of the evaluation period. However, there is a very easy workaround so that you can continue to use the VPC and evaluate this preview of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

Virtual PC allows you to disable the synchronization between the clock in your virtual machine and the clock on your hardware machine. Once the synchronization is disabled, the clock will only tick forward when the VPC is running. This gives you 2 months of total evaluation time for the VPC.

Jeff Beehler does a great job of describing how to do this in his blog post. Make sure you do this with a newly decompressed VHD image so you can maximize the amount of time you have to evaluate the software.

Also, there are other activation messages that you will run into. Brian Keller has a great blog post describing these messages and what you can do about them.