Visual Studio 2008 First Impressions

Yesterday VS.net 2008 shipped and is made available for download to MSDN subscribers. For the general public a trial edition is available for download.

For Vista users my suggestion do not use the link above and go to you subscription download page. The akamai download manager on the Top Downloads page causes all kinds of problems in Vista. The security restrictions in Vista does not allow the download manager to write to any folders even the %USERPROFILE%\Downloads folder. It virtualizes all folders to the Temporary Internet Folders. Actually I had to download twice the first time I left it download overnight it download in the virtualized folder and my nightly clean up job cleaned up the temporary folders. It took me a while to figure out why I could not find my files.
On XP actually the download is faster from the Top Downloads page then the MSDN Subscription Download Page.

Warning do not be fooled by the Team Foundation Server Trial Link(Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Trial (x86 and x64 WoW) - DVD (English)). Team foundation server is not supported on a 64-bit OS. My hopes were raised looking at the name but it turned that the installer won't install on a 64 bit OS.

On my first attempt to install the Installer got stuck at last step the the SmartPhone SDK. I was not even able to cancel it just go hung. I had to kill the installer. Restart the machine and do a repair then everything installed fine.

I found a few warnings and errors in the event log which did not make much sense to me. Hopefully my install is not corrupt. I was able to upgrade an existing VS.NET 2005 project and run it.

One more weird thing that happened on my machine was the suddenly I lost 8 GB space on my hard drive and had to run the disk clean up utility which was able to recover all the 8 GB space that was filled. I am hoping that had nothing to do with the install.

I hope me bad experience with the installer is just a one of case as one my colleagues reported that he was able to install the IDE without any issues.

I am currently having second thoughts whether to install VS.NET 2008 on my Vista 64bit machine. Hopefully I will install it over the long weekend.