Orcas VPC Download info

Greg pointed me to the Visual Studio Orcas CTP Virtual PC image download. Downloading now.

First of all, I'm really happy to see a VPC image download. We've been asking for this for a little while, and it's great to see it happen.

Make sure you follow the download instructions carefully. There are two downloads - a base image and a difference disk image. That's smart for bandwidth, since future releases will only require download of the new difference disk, but it might throw you off if you only download the difference disk.

I see from Greg's screenshot he's just using IE to download them:

 

When I'm downloading a GB or more, I like to go with a download manager like the Download Them All Firefox extension. Back when I was using IE, I used Download Express. There are a lot of good reasons for using a download manager for big downloads:

  • They download in multiple concurrent chunks, which is usually noticibly faster on large downloads.
  • They let you pause the downloads. That was handy when I wanted to watch the OnTen Zune video.
  • If something goes wrong part way through - which always seems to happen on huge downloads - download managers let you resume the download.
  • They have really cool download progress graphs.
  • They don't display negative progress - see Greg's -318% completion status above. ;-)

  

However you decide to get them, go get them!

6 Comments

  • Could you please send me a login/password to Base0 ?
    I have extracted it using 7zip and deleted... I thing there was a login/password information during the installation progress if you just run exe file..
    Thank you.

  • @Alexey - the download page gives the following credentials:
    Username: Administrator
    Password: P@ssw0rd

    http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=82243606-d16d-445c-8949-9ee8c10cda2e&displaylang=en

  • Nice if MS mentioned that a download manager was necessary! After installing "DownThemAll" I finally got a proper download.

  • For anybody recently downloading Orcas, the new password for the image was changed to 'P2ssw0rd' because of issues with non-US keyboard layouts.

  • I was in search of the same

  • Will someone please send me the ADO.Net vNext August 2006 CTP? Since MS no longer has it up. Many thanks in advance.

    Send to darren_dugan@hotmail.com

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