A More Reliable and Faster Download Experience for VS2010/ VS08 VPC's
***Updated 12/29/2011: The files mentioned in this post are no longer available. For the latest virtual machines, sample data, and hands-on-labs / demo scripts please visit https://blogs.msdn.com/briankel.
One of the things we have received great customer feedback on is the availability of Virtual PC environments containing Visual Studio 2008 and pre-releases of Visual Studio 2010. The VPC's are pre-configured to help speed the evaluation of these pre-releases without requiring an extensive setup process to get started. However, unless you have a fast and reliable Internet connection (or even if you do) the process of downloading these VPC's can be a bit grueling.
I've developed a technique for downloading these VPC's which makes the process a bit easier and much faster in my opinion. Hopefully this helps you, too.
- Download and install Free Download Manager. This utility provides:
- Auto-resume support for interrupted downloads.
- Multiple simultaneous download streams for (usually) a much faster download experience.
- As the name implies, it's completely free.
- Download and open VS08_URLs.txt from the link at the bottom of this blog post.
- Within the text file you just downloaded, highlight the list of URL's for the download you are interested in and copy this to the clipboard.
- Now launch the user interface for Free Download Manager (either from the Start Menu or via the system tray icon if FDM is already running).
- Click File -> Import -> Import List of URLs from Clipboard.
- When prompted for a download group, accept the default ("Other") and click OK.
- You are now free to minimize Free Download Manager while the files download. By default, they will be saved to c:\downloads.
- When the files have finished downloading, visit the Download Details page for the respective release and follow the instructions to finish extracting and running your VPC.
- VSTS 2008 “all-up” Hyper-V image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
- VSTS 2008 “all-up” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (6 GB download, expands to 15 GB)
- TFS 2008 “only” Hyper-V image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)
- TFS 2008 “only” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (3 GB download, expands to 8 GB)
NOTE: If you wish to download multiple VPC's from this set you can do so by simply repeating steps 3-8.
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