First of all, I must say that sitting on the end of a 3MB cable Internet connection is fabulous.  I was able to download all of the VS 2005 Beta Cd's, 2005 MSDN library and the Express product betas in a few hours.  I wanted to start playing with them before the DVD's are mailed out (could be 2 weeks) so I went ahead and grabbed them from MSDN.

The Express products can be downloaded by anyone and I initially downloaded them from the public site.  I was disappointed during the installations when I had only a setup and it had to go retrieve the full product with another download.  I must have missed that note somewhere.  With VB.NET and C# the download was not bad since they are under 30 meg, but with VWD (Visual Web Developer) the download was something like 186 meg.  If you have MSDN you might want to skip this by just grabbing the full ISO images.  Again, very nice to have a fast connection to the net!

I decided to put the 3 Express products I might use (VB, C#, VWD) as well as SQL Express all on a single VPC image.  That will allow me to play with them but not have to manage too many extra playgrounds.  The installation for all 4 products was smooth and I am looking forward to giving them each a test drive soon.

VS 2005 Beta 1 surprised me with its install.  I first tried it using the Windows XP Virtual CD-ROM tool, but I got an error on the first CD ISO image.  I am not sure why, but after making real CD's to install from everything went great.  I do not remember how long the install of VS 2003 took on my laptop, but I do believe 2005 Beta 1 was significantly faster.  I am installing on a VPC using a firewire drive for the image, but I would think that to be slower than the native OS and built-in IDE drive.  I will be curious to see what others think of the install time.  I am at about 2.5 hours right now and just got the reboot message.  This still isn't a coffee break install, but none of the VS.NET products have been.  The best part with VPC is that I can use the Undo feature and also share this image with co-workers saving them the install and setup time.  I wonder how long it will be before VPC images become the norm for beta products and all software testing?

For beta 1 so far I am very pleased!  Now it's time to start coding and see where the dev teams are still working on the feature set ........