Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2

Hmmm, wonder how I missed a blog from yesterday? Must have been one of those days.

Anywho, the Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 release is available to MSDN subscribers now on the download site. It includes refreshes of SQL Server 2005 and the various Team versions of VS2005 (developer, test, architect). It also includes the Suite version which includes all three as well as the foundation (the server portion of VS2005). The Suite version is available so you can see what each flavours have capability wise and let you decide which one is right for you. Regular MSDN subscribers will only get to choose one when the product is released so here's your chance to give each one a test drive.

(image from greg hughes - dot - net)

What's odd is that I checked to see if it was available yesterday around 3PM which it wasn't. I check later and started downloading it off the MSDN site this morning around 1AM. By the time I headed off to work this morning at 8AM it hadn't finished downloading so I decided to just start a new download at work (besides, it's a 3.5gb image and I really didn't want to burn a DVD) however checking now it's not available to me (under the same account). Very odd to see how the trickle works so I must be hitting one of the machines on the web cluster that it hasn't made it's way down yet.

Update: 10AM and the files are there. Now another 15 hours of downloading and a few days of blowing up virtual images and we'll be all set.

Anyways, check it out if you have an MSDN account. I think they'll be making DVDs available for a shipping fee like they did Beta 1 but I'm sure you'll be able to pick one up at any Microsoft Event like TechEd 2005 coming up in June.