Extending the Nov 07 Rosario CTP Virtual PC

I've been demonstrating the capabilities of Visual Studio Team System recently in a series of tech briefings.  In addition to what is available today, I've been showing some of what the future might hold using the November 2007 Community Technology Preview (CTP) of code name "Rosario".

Unfortunately, about a week ago the Visual Studio preview time-bombed and my demos became far less compelling.  Actually, the CTP wasn't really scheduled to be obsolete yet and legally it can be extended for continued investigation or, in my case, demonstrations.  I did the time honored trick of setting the clock of the Virtual PC's host back to a time before the expiration and managed to keep the demos alive.

At some point we can expect Microsoft to release another CTP without this problem.  In the mean time, if you have the CTP and want to keep playing, Jeff Beehler offered me this little trick...  You can turn off the synchronization of the VPC to the host machine by modifying the *.vmc (in this case Nov2007RosarioCTP.vmc).

To do so, edit your VMC and add the following within the  <preferences><integration><microsoft> node:

<components>
  <host_time_sync>
    <enabled type="boolean">false</enabled>
  </host_time_sync>
</components>

A few side notes:  First, the release date on the Rosario CTP download page has been updated so this trick might only be needed for people who have already downloaded the image and don't want to re-download the 4.8GB image.  Since I haven't downloaded the newer image I can't confirm this assumption.

Second, TFS doesn't like going back in time.  If you are going to set the clock back on the VPC to allow it to keep working, don't set it back to a time before the last activity in the VPC TFS.

Finally, this trick isn't to get around licensing issues.  Since this is a prerelease, the trick is only to keep us up and running until Microsoft gets a new version for us to play with.

Enjoy!