Get an early look at Visual Studio 2008

The next version of Visual Studio, Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008, will provide an industry-leading developer experience for Windows Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, and the Web. In addition, it will continue in the Microsoft tradition of development language innovation. To enable early feedback, this page provides links to prerelease versions of Visual Studio 2008, and for technologies that we plan to include in it. As previews of additional technologies become available, we will make them available from this page.

The Beta 2 release includes most of the products found in the Visual Studio product line. As with all prerelease software, we encourage you only to install these on a secondary machine, or in a virtual machine, as they are not supported by Microsoft Services support teams. As the goal of these previews is to gather feedback from the developer community, please use Microsoft Connect to report any issues, or to suggest improvements. MSDN Subscribers can also download these files from MSDN Subscriber Downloads.

Files & Disc Images for Self-installation

If you prefer to install the software yourself, you can download separate disc images for the following products:

• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Express Editions
• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Standard Edition
• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Professional Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2 Team Suite
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2 Team Foundation Server
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2 Test Load Agent
• MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

IMPORTANT:

• After the Beta 2 installation has finished, you should run this script to ensure that the installation of .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 will not affect the development of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications.
• To install Team Foundation Server, you must follow the steps and system requirements details on the download page.
• When installing prerelease software, we advise that you do not install it on a production machine.

VPC Images with Pre-installed Software

If you prefer the convenience of evaluating prerelease software in a virtual machine environment, you can download VPC images for the following products that include pre-installed instances of the prerelease software indicated, including any required prerequisite software. You will need Virtual PC or Virtual Server to run this image. Depending on your hardware, the download files make take between 30-60 minutes to decompress these self-extracting files.

• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2 Team Suite VPC
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2 Team Suite & Team Foundation Server VPC

IMPORTANT:

• After extracting and opening the VPC, you should run this script to ensure that the installation of .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 will not affect the development of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 applications.
• These downloads are differencing disks. To use them, you must also download Visual Studio Code Name Orcas Base Image contains the OS and is a one-time download for all the Virtual PC images that lay on top of it.

For previous relelases, see Archived Downloads.

Courtesy by microsoft.com