I got fairly excited about the contents of the January 2007 community technology preview of the next version of Visual Studio: the ADO.NET Entity Framework; LINQ; XLINQ; integration between ADO.NET and LINQ; managed classes for Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm cryptographic functionality; Login/Logout, Role management and Profile support for smart client I got fairly excited about the contents of the January 2007 community technology preview of the next version of Visual Studio: the ADO.NET Entity Framework; LINQ; XLINQ; integration between ADO.NET and LINQ; managed classes for Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm cryptographic functionality; Login/Logout, Role management and Profile support for smart clients; BigInteger support; and SQL Server Compact Edition. I’ve already seen the LINQ material, but the rest is new and sounds interesting.In preparation for installing this, I removed a couple of things from my production Visual Studio 2005 installation: the May LINQ CTP, which had previews of C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0; and the November CTP, which had Visual Studio support for Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation projects.Only then did I read the new CTP’s download pages and release notes in detail. Oops. Virtual PC Download | Self-Extracting Install Download bits | Release NotesThe release notes listed enough problems beyond the usual “don’t use this for production” disclaimer to scare me off from installing the bits onto my recently repaired Visual Studio 2005 instance. No problem, I’ll install the Virtual PC.NOT! The January 2007 “Orcas” CTP Virtual PC image requires Virtual PC 2004 SP1, or Virtual Server 2005 R2. As it happens, I run a beta of Virtual PC 2007, which fixes the virtual DVD image size limit I encountered in Virtual PC 2004 SP1 when trying to install betas of Visual Studio into a Virtual PC image by myself. I could try to use the VPC 2007 beta, I suppose: I’ll bet it would work, even though it’s not officially supported. All it would cost me to find out would be the download and install time for the images, and I could probably let that happen overnight.Unfortunately, there’s another requirement: 1 GB of available physical RAM for the Virtual PC image to run. I have 1 GB of physical RAM in my development box, but only about half of that is available, according to Task Manager. I suppose I could clean boot without many of the services I usually run, but that still wouldn’t make the whole 1 GB available. I can currently run 512 MB Virtual PC images, but not 1 GB Virtual PC images.I could go buy another GB of RAM for this computer: I’m reluctant to do so, because it’s almost 3 years old, but it’s still probably my best option. I could build or buy a new computer, but there are issues: not enough time to build one, and not enough money to buy one. Maybe I’ll wait for the February CTP. Software Development