Summary

These are my notes and observations on Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. This article focuses on my installation of VS 2008 Beta 2 on a Windows Vista Ultimate machine. This article also has some screenshots from the installation.

The Download

The download file is 3.2GB for the Team Suite. It took about (less than) 3hrs on a fast DSL connection to download the DVD image file.

Figure 1: Downloading the Visual Studio 2008 img file

Copy to a DVD

As suggested in the installation notes, it’s best to copy this to a DVD. If you are looking to install Visual Studio 2008, your computer is most likely equipped with a DVD-RW drive. You can also mount the file virtually as DVD divice and install from there.

Burning the DVD using Roxio

The downloaded file is a .img file. The Roxio I have needs a .iso file to burn it to DVD. As I understand renaming the .img file to .iso file would work.

Figure 2: Burning the renamed img file (renamed OrcasBeta2VSTSX1394647.img to OrcasBeta2VSTSX1394647.iso)

After renaming the .img file to .iso file and copying it to DVD, the setup works just fine me. If you had problems with burning after the conversion, you may want to try some other dvd burning utility. The Windows DVD Maker that comes with Windows Vista does not recognize either the .iso format or the .img format.

Screenshots of Visual Studio 2008 installation

Visual Studio 2008 Setup Dialog

The familiar first setup dialog box that hasn’t changed from Visual Studio 2005 (I think the look and feel of the installation dialog boxes hasn’t changed for a while -- Visual Studio 2003 and earlier). I don’t think even the photos of the people on the installation screens changed – they all look very familiar.

Figure 3: The first dialog box from the VS 2008 installation.

Figure 4: The main setup screen

The feature set dialog box

As seen from Options dialog box, I chose to install everything (except a couple of very specific things under Visual C++). This is the default selection of options.

Figure 5: The Options Page

Figure 6: Beginning to install Visual Studio Team System 2008

Figure 7: Completion of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 installation

Installing MSDN

Figure 8: Installing MSDN

Time to Install

Following are some notes on the amount of time it took to download and install Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.

Installing Visual Studio 2008 and MSDN: About 3.5hrs

Total Time: About 6.5hrs

Even though it takes about 6.5hrs, you need to click something only about half-a-dozen times. The computer reboots a couple of times: once after the installation of .Net Framework 3.5 and once after all the Visual Studio 2008 is installed.

Screenshot of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2

And here is the screenshot after when VS 2008 is started for the first time. The UI is very similar to that of VS 2005. The windows have extra touch of gray at the bottom and around the sides. And the header bars are slightly different.