Thursday, September 06, 2007 9:33 PM
by
briankel
A More Reliable and Faster Download Experience for Rosario / VS08 VPC's
***Updated 6/13/2008: I am now pointing to the updated Visual Studio 2008 VPC's which have an extended expiration (December 31, 2008). I have also included the link to the Hands-on Labs with the Team Suite + TFS download list.
***Updated 4/14/2004: I have updated the .txt attachment containing the list of URL's. The Rosario links now point to the April 2008 CTP which we released last week.
***Updated 1/4/2008: I have updated the .txt attachment to point to the official RTM versions of the Visual Studio 2008 VPC's. As such I have removed the Beta 2 VPC links.
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 Team System Code Name "Rosario." 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_And_Rosario_URLs.txt.
- 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. For example, in the screenshot below I have selected the VS08 Beta 2 Team Suite + TFS VPC URL's.
- 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.
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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