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Microsoft has released a lot of stuff for developers to look in the last week. I had downloads going most of the day last Friday, even though I have an 8 Mbit/s business cable connection to the Internet. I still haven't installed everything I've downloaded, much less looked at it in any detail.
Visual Studio users will want to see beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008. The master public download page for that is here; I personally downloaded the Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Suite & Team Foundation Server Beta 2 VPC, but that's only one of about eight options. If you're feeling adventurous and are not behind a corporate firewall, try the Microsoft Secure Content Downloader (MSCD), a peer-to-peer download channel now being tested for Visual Studio 2008 beta 2.
If you have an MSDN subscription, you can get Studio 2008 beta 2 as a Subscriber Download, in one of five flavors. For some reason, the combined VSTS/TFS VPC is not available as a Subscriber Download: don't ask me why. I got perfectly good performance using the public download site on Friday, but it does sometimes get overloaded; when it does, the Subscriber Download site usually provides a better download experience.
Many other new downloads that you are you likely to want have to do with Silverlight, Microsoft's new RIA environment:
- Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate (runtime only)
- Silverlight 1.0 RC SDK (for developers)
- Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh (runtime only)
- Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh SDK (for developers)
- Expression Blend 2 August 2008 Preview (supports Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh)
- Microsoft Silverlight Alpha Tools for Visual Studio 2008 Beta
You might also want to download the Acropolis CTP and samples, which were posted earlier in July. Acropolis is basically a new "set of components and tools that make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business focused, client .NET applications."
Posted by Martin Heller on August 1, 2007 01:44 PM
