Maybe I’m late to the party, but I didn’t know the ASP.NET “Whidbey” Hands-On Labs from the PDC were posted.

I’m on a quest for the Longhorn labs. Anyone?

I have a 3+GB partition in which I used to install the Virtual PC (VPC) image for Longhorn. As it turns out, that doesn’t seem to be enough room to install Longhorn along with the SDK. Being a newbie with VPC and not wanting to investigate creating additional VPC partitions (if that’s possible), I purchased PartitionMagic 8.0. A must have for any superuser that likes to futz with their partitions to install additional OS’es or separate partitions for VPC images. Now I have around 6GB to muck with for my Longhorn partition. Will that be enough for the SDK plus Yukon? We’ll see. If not, I’ll probably for-go the coolness that is Virtual PC and buy a separate hard drive to install all the PDC bits on. If anything, it should increase the speed of working with Longhorn – hopefully. How is everyone working with their PDC bits? Virtual PC or dedicated machines?

Do you ever read the README.TXT files before installing Alpha software? Me neither. Well, it just so happened that I did read the README file for the Whidbey install seeing as how they provided such an easily accessible link (right before the link to install VS “Whidbey“). Anyhow if you read the README, it clearly states:

Both Visual Studio “Whidbey” Technology Preview and Visual Studio 6.0 can be installed on the same computer and run at the same time.

As I’m scrolling down, I’m expecting “Whidbey” to run side-by-side with 2002. Nope.

It is not recommended to install Visual Studio 2002 and Visual Studio “Whidbey” Technology Preview on the same computer. It is recommended to first uninstall Visual Studio 2002 before installing Visual Studio “Whidbey” Technology Preview. Side-by-side support was not fully enabled at the time of the Technology Preview release.

What about 2003? Nope.

It is not recommended to install Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio “Whidbey” Technology Preview on the same computer. It is recommended to first uninstall Visual Studio 2003 before installing Visual Studio “Whidbey” Technology Preview. Side-by-side support was not fully enabled at the time of the Technology Preview release.

Anyhow it states, “It is not recommended”, no problem than, right?. What the hey… I like to live dangerously and ignore all warnings and decide to install Whidbey along side 2002 and 2003. Now mind you, I’m not using this particular machine for any mission critical development work. If I was, I’m more than prepared to wipe it clean and do a fresh install. My machine has been acting a little nut’so ever since I installed Microsoft Office 2003. But I’m not blaming Office 2003 for the effects. I have some open source spam tools integrated with Outlook 2003 and I don’t think they’re playing nice.

Any way back to living dangerously… So far, so good. The only hiccup I’ve come across is the strange goings-on with MSDN help for 2003 and Whidbey. For some reason, the main content page, and content tab for that matter, is blank. I can still search for the content, but I can’t drill down using the content tab. Whidbey’s help seems to be acting the same way, but I’m not sure they put the content info into this release. A little annoying, but workable. As for the 2002 help, it seems to be fine. Does anyone know how to reset the content tab for 2003? Does one exist for Whidbey?

I am now running with a cool 1GB of memory on my Dell C840 laptop! How cool is that?!?!? 4AllMemory.com had a 512MB chip, for my Dell, for the low-low price of $114.99 plus free shippping. I ordered the memory on Wednesday and it arrived on Thursday. Now that’s service!

Virtual PC Beta 4 is loaded and Longhorn is installed. Drum-roll please…….Doh! What’s with this 4bit color scheme??? Ahh… I need to learn how to read the ‘Read Me’ file. I need to install the Virtual PC Additions. Done. And Presto… Here’s Longhorn running in a Virtual PC session on my laptop:

What’s next? Now it’s time to install the Longhorn SDK and create my first Longhorn app. with XAML. I’ll keep you posted.

Korby Parnell has some information regarding an update to Visual SourceSafe! Looks like they’re playing catchup to some of the 3rd party tools.

If you’ve installed the Whidbey bits, you’ll notice an inconspicuous Program Group titled ‘Visual SourceSafe 2004′. Don’t get your hopes up to high, from a simple run through the only items I can find that are different from 6.0d is a new splash screen and different icons representing the project folders and source files. Hopefully more will come out soon regarding the update. Keep an eye on Korby Parnell’s blog, as he seems to be the man in the know.