Help in your Visual Studio VPC RAR Part Download Battle (aka How to avoid the VPC download blues…)

Brian Keller: Technical Evangelist for Team System - 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 4/14/2008: 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.

…”

Brian provides some help (in the form of text file of URL’s for all the RAR parts for a number of Visual Studio VPC downloads) and tips on getting them downloaded.

If you want to check out Rosario, or play with Team Foundation Server or the full Team System Suite, then the VPC route is the only way to go… (that will keep you sane and your systems clean)