Orcas CTP: I Probably Should Have Waited

After buying and installing another gigabyte of RAM for my Windows development box, downloading about 6 gigabytes of compressed virtual PC images, and putting my computer to work for several hours decompressing and assembling the images, I finally have a working copy of the Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” January 2007 CTP as a virtual PC.

It does work. It doesn’t mess up my Visual Studio 2005 installation. On the whole, running this drop as a VPC is a better idea than applying the preview bits to a production system.

It probably wasn’t worth the effort this time around, however. I probably should have gone with my initial instinct and waited for the February CTP drop, which as I understand it is scheduled to have full LINQ support, a design surface for Windows Presentation Foundation, the new Web design surface that Scott Guthrie blogged about here, y mucho mas.

On the other hand, setting this up was a learning experience. I now know that the Virtual PC 2007 beta works just fine with the January “Orcas” image. I also know that the image was built for 384 MB of RAM to be available to the Windows Server 2003 system it contains. Adding in the RAM needed for video in the image and for Virtual PC to run comes out to a need for less than 512 MB of available RAM in the host computer, not the 1 GB that was documented. My Task Manager readout confirms that: with the VPC image running, I have over 1 GB of available RAM remaining to the host system.

In other words, I could have skipped buying the extra GB of RAM. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to have it, and I might actually be happy that I do at some future date.

Another interesting conclusion: since the January “Orcas” image works with the Virtual PC 2007 beta, and the Virtual PC 2007 beta runs under Windows Vista, it should actually be possible to run the “Orcas” Virtual PC images under Windows Vista, even though this is not supported by Microsoft.