Update Dec 10: Visual Studio will expire on Jan 1 2009. You will need to disable time synchronization before then if you want to continue using it without re-downloading. 

It’s been a week since we released (and then re-released) the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP to the web and PDC2008 attendees.

The goal of the Community Technology Preview is to obtain feedback from our customers on the new scenarios we have enabled. We have defined step by step walkthroughs to help them discover these new scenarios. You are encouraged to set up the CTP and engage directly in a conversation regarding each walkthrough with the team working on that scenario in a forum thread. You can learn more about the CTP and engage in a conversation with the team from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=129231

You can download the VPC from here. It’s quite a large download at 7.11GB and I suggest you follow Brian Keller’s post on a more reliable and faster download experience.

The purpose of this post is to show you that it is possible to run the CTP under Hyper-V. This can yield better performance depending on your hardware configuration.

Caveats:

• This is not an officially tested scenario. Things may or may not work. You’re on your own.
• Microsoft Excel is immediately crippled to reduced functionality mode. You will need to install your own licensed copy if you want to use it.
• Microsoft Project remains in countdown mode.

Hardware Recommendations:

This is my personal setup, and I can say that it runs quite well. Your mileage may vary. Remember that this is a preview release and we’ve not yet gone through a performance optimization phase yet.

• A host machine running Windows 2008 64-bit with the Hyper-V role installed
• Host machine with 4Gb RAM, 2Gb dedicated to the virtual machine
• Virtual machine on a second hard-drive. Ideally a high-speed 10K RPM or similar.

Summary:

1. Download the CTP and uncompress it
2. Create a new Virtual Machine in Hyper-V Manager
3. Attach the extracted .vhd
4. Boot the virtual machine
5. Uninstall Virtual PC VM Additions by going to Control Panel > Programs and Features
6. Run msconfig.exe and enable ‘Detect HAL’ under Advanced options
7. Reboot
8. Install the Hyper-V Integration Services
9. Reboot
10. Wait for all the new hardware to be detected
11. Reboot
12. Install your own copy of Excel
13. Take a snapshot
14. Enjoy!

Steps:

Once you download the 11 RAR files at 7.11Gb and extract them, you should have two files:

1. VisualStudio2010CTP.vhd (23.0Gb)
2. VisualStudio2010CTP.vmc

The first step is to open Hyper-V Manager on Windows 2008 and go to Action > New > Virtual Machine…, you will then be taken through the wizard of setting up a new guest virtual machine.

If you have a second hard-drive, you’ll want to move the .vhd and store the virtual machine on that drive. I recommend something like the WD 10K RPM VelociRaptor.

Although the Virtual PC comes configured for 1Gb of memory, I suggest that you give it at least 2Gb for the best performance. The image contains a 32-bit version of Windows 2008, so giving it more than 3.5Gb is not worthwhile.

The next screen asks you to configure networking. I strongly suggest that you don’t connect this image to the network. Among other things (Virus protection, etc), if you have two machines on the network with the same machine name (which you cannot change in this CTP), then they will get confused and try and talk to each other.

Now you need to attach to the existing .vhd that you extracted from the RAR files download.

On the summary screen, you’ll want to uncheck ‘Start the virtual machine after it is created’. This is so that we can create an initial snapshot before we’ve done anything to the VHD.

Once you’ve created a snapshot using Hyper-V Manager and started the VPC, it will look something like this:

The first step is to open up Control Panel > Programs and Features > Virtual Machine Additions > Uninstall

Before rebooting, we’ll enable the ‘Detect HAL’ option in the boot configuration. This option is necessary, otherwise none of the Hyper-V services will start once they are installed later on. See MSDN: The VMBus device does not load on a virtual machine that is running on a Windows Server 2008-based computer that has Hyper-V installed, for more information.

Go to Start > Run > msconfig.exe > Advanced Options… > Detect HAL. Shutdown the virtual machine.

(Optional) Once the virtual machine has shut down, open the Hyper-V session Settings, click ‘Processor’ and change the “Number of logical processors” from 1 to X (where X is the number of cores on your box)

Once you reboot, you will need to install the Hyper-V Integration Services.  To do this, select Action > Insert Integration Services Setup Disk from the Hyper-V console.

You will be prompted that a previous installation has been detected, press OK.

The installation should proceed. Reboot when the installation is complete.

Once the machine reboots and you logon to it, you should see Windows installing new hardware drivers. Once all these complete, restart the machine.

Once the machine reboots, start Visual Studio and confirm that everything is working and that Team Explorer connects to TFS correctly.

You’ll now need to install your own copy of Excel if you want to use the TFS/office integration components.

If everything seems to be working, create a snapshot of your freshly converted Hyper-V VM. This will allow you to revert back to this snapshot at any time.

If you have any problems with these steps, please leave a comment and/or start a thread on the VS2010 CTP discussion forums.