Windows Vista 30-Day Evaluation VPC

On Wednesday, my colleague Christian Beauclair posted about the expiry of the Betas and Release Candidates of Windows Vista. Last night, I attended Kate Gregory's talk on "Programming for Windows Vista" for the Toronto .NET User Group and a lot of people in the community wanted to know if there was any way that they could otherwise evaluate Windows Vista. If you think about it, it's pretty important to test out your applications on Windows Vista to make sure it's a good experience for the people who will be using your software, website or application.

Recently, we announced the availability of a 30-day evaluation copy of Windows Vista as a VirtualPC image. Here are the steps to obtain and run this copy of Windows Vista:

• Make sure you have a computer that has at least 2 Gigs of RAM and 10-20 Gigs of hard drive space. If you can find a computer with 4 Gigs of RAM, you'll get good performance.
   
• Download and install Microsoft VirtualPC 2007 or Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 (they are both free). If you are unfamiliar with these products, I'd recommend VirtualPC as the main choice. Be sure to check out the product demo to understand what it can do.
  
• Download the Microsoft Windows Vista 30-Day Eval VHD

Happy downloading!