Hi Guys, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 CTP in October. You’ll be amazed with the download size its near about 7 GB. You can download it from here.

After you download you’ll run the .exe file to extract the setup and the setup is of the .vhd format that is Virtual PC hard disk. So you’ll need Virtual PC to run Visual Studio 2010.

But, but, but guys please check out the minimum requirement for this CTP to run. Hard disk space required is 75 GB, yes, its not 7.5 but 75 GB. Well that’s not true you can have this CTP run if you have upto 25 GB on one drive.

When you extract the .exe file the .vhd file extracted is of size 23 GB.  Also when you bind the .vhd file to the virtual pc, you need minimum 1GB ram allocated to the Virtual PC disk.

When I ran the Visual Studio for the first time the screen took around 10 mins to load and I just shut down the CTP and got back to work.

The reason for the extracted file to be of 23 GB is because that VHD when you map to Virtual PC will have Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2008,  SQL  Server 2008, SQL Server 2005 + many more software installed.

When you execute the Virtual PC which is mapped to VHD, Virtual PC will load Windows Server 2008 and it takes lots of  burden it killed my laptop. Although I have fair enough configuration. My processor is Core 2 Duo, 1.83 GHZ and with 1 GB ram. Yet it just killed my PC performance.

I even tried to extract the file on an External Hard Disk and Even on my IPod classic. But I was able to extract only first rar file. I googled the reason and found it was because the External Hard Disk is of FAT32 format and they do not support data transfer of more than 4GB. So I had to clean up my Hard Disk and extract 23 GB .vhd file there.

I really did not understood why Microsoft shipped Visual Studio 2010 this way. With 7GB download size and 23 GB extracted file. I was really disappointed with such strategy. Microsoft must have shipped Visual Studio 2010 as a single file. What could be the reason for adopting this process?

Here is my Virtual PC screen shot with Visual Studio 2010

As anticipated, Microsoft used CES to launch the beta of Windows 7, posting the preview of the company’s next operating system to its developer download services.

Microsoft made it clear that the beta will be available for a “limited time,” and said it will cap the beta after the first 2.5 million downloads.

IT professionals and developers who subscribe to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) or TechNet services, however, get a jump on the public at large; they can grab the beta right away.

The beta, which Microsoft called “feature complete,” requires a PC with a 1GHz processor, 1GB of memory, 16GB of available hard disk space and support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory, according to Microsoft, which also warned that the recommendations could change for the final version. The beta only supports an upgrade from Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1).

Microsoft declined to get specific about upgrade paths for the final version of Windows 7, or to spell out how many editions it would produce and what it would charge for each. The beta is “roughly equivalent” to the Ultimate version of Vista , it added.

Both 32- and 64-bit versions of the beta will be available for downloading, but only English, German, Japanese, Arabic and Hindi editions will be posted Friday. Other language versions are expected at the product’s launch.

To install the beta, users must have a DVD drive able to burn disk images to a blank disc. The beta, said Microsoft in a follow-up blog it published Wednesday, will be available as an .iso file. It did not spell out the size of the download.

The beta expires on Aug. 1, 2009.

The Windows 7 download will be posted to Microsoft’s site on Friday, Jan. 9.