Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview

I recieved my copy of the VS2005 CTP on the thursday before the summit, I stowed it away in my laptop bag and planned to install it at night in my hotel room during the summit.  I read the back which said I may have to format my hard drive, I was even told by Brian Goldfarb who said, “Did you read the part about formatting your hard drive?”  I figured nah... They're just saying that and it wouldn't actually do that much damage.  It turns out they weren't kidding. 

Here's how things progressed: I'm working on a OracleMembershipProvider for ASP.NET Whidbey so I figured I'd install CTP locally to work on that.  CTP installed with no problems, it was great.  I start it up, very smooth things seemed to be working nicely :)  I was happy.  I then tried to check my code into Vault and that's when the problems began.  In vault, when you hit the button to add a new file it opens a modal dialog box.  For some reason whidbey CTP refused to open said dialog box.  I took a look at the side by side stuff which basically said a .net app is processed by the .net framework for which it was compiled/built.  Things should have been working, but nothing I did resurrected vault & the dialog box.  I even went to the extent of checking in/out of vault via the command line tool ( i deseparately wanted to keep VS2005 CTP on my laptop, its just hard to work with in VPC, tolerable but hard).  Finally I decided it was time to uninstall, I just couldn't go without vault as I use it for other things as well.  CTP seemed to uninstall gracefully, no errors received and I figured i was in the clear.. I wasn't.  With .NET 2.0 and whidbey off my machine Vault (there were other apps, vault wasn't alone) was still not functional.  Figuring a fresh reinstall of VS.NET 2003 would solve the problem I grabbed my dvds and reinstalled.  That still did not work.  Saturday morning I'd waved the white flag and proceeded down to CompUSA to get a firewire hard drive and a copy of norton ghost (to facilitate backups/reimaging that would be needed). 

I ghosted the laptop in its broken state, I wanted a backup of my files and to have a record of it (which I still have if its useful for debugging in any way)I then reinstalled Windows XP, Visual Studio 6, Visual Studio.NET 2003, MS SQL Developer Ed, and Sourcegear Vault, when this was complete I grabbed a ghost image of this configuration.  After installing some more things (office & making some config changes) I restored the backup I'd just made.  (An untested backup is about as useful as soggy cardboard) I've now got a good baseline image for my machine, and a second image that's fully configured.  I'm pretty excited about this, with these images I've got a lot of flexiblity in terms of what I can do with my machines.  If I want to install Longhorn for a weekend and just play I can, reimaging takes about 20 - 30 minutes (a far far cry from the 8hrs it took to reinstall everything).  The firewire HD i got is about 250GB, my laptop is 60gb so a fresh install w/ dev tools comes to around 10 - 15gb.  At this rate I can have many images on the firewire disk to play with, not bad at all. 

So in the end I've got a much better backup proceedure than I had previously, and I made up with Ghost (see my previous post on ghost/backups).  In my opinion Ghost is a tool all developers who use bleeding edge software should have, that and a big set of disks for image storage.