How to play with .Net 3.5/VS2008 SP1 Beta without jacking your machine - A Step By Step Guide...

MyVSTSBlog - Evaluating the VSTS/TFS 2008 SP1 Beta - How to get started

"Now that Microsoft has released the beta versions of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, TFS 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, how should you go about evaluating them? Remember - As beta products, you should NOT install these in production environments. (OK - so you're not silly enough to consider that anyway)

One of the best ways to evaluate these Service Pack 1 betas, is to use the pre-configured VSTS/TFS 2008 virtual machine which is available from the Microsoft web site. The following steps will walk you through downloading and installing the trial VPC and then adding the betas to the virtual machine.

..."

A six step guide to getting you ready to play with TFS2008/VS2008/.Net 3.5 SP1 Beta on a Virtual PC VHD.

As you know (or may not), this SP is a pretty big one, feature wise. The Entity Framework, ADO.Net Data Services, ASP Dynamic Data, new WPF stuff, faster client application startup, improved end user .Net setup experience, etc, etc. This is a .1 or almost a .5 release in its scope...

Check out Scott Guthrie's post, Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta, for more details on SP1...