In case you didn't know - MS have made a CTP of VS 2010 available through Connect.  Last time I looked the download had been taken offline to be migrated to MSDN downloads, but take a look here and follow the download link - eventually it will be back up.  Weighing in at a 7Gb RAR, it's a meaty beast and uncompressed the VHD is just over 22Gb.

I guess you can't blame them, but Microsoft always make the mistake of making their CTP VMs on their own standalone virtualisation platform - Virtual PC or Virtual Server.  I say that with tongue firmly in cheek, of course, however I have to say that until I've got Hyper-V on my dev box (and that won't be for a while, given the overhead that Win2008 puts on my box before I've got everything else installed!) I will use VMware Server.  Okay, yeah sure, it expires every couple of months - forcing me to download the latest binary and reinstall - but ultimately the pros outweigh the cons.

I find the underlying performance of the VMs to be excellent, and it's java Console interacts beautifully with the virtual machine's desktop - especially once VMWare Tools is installed - meaning that UI response in the VM is almost as good as it would be on the real machine.  I find the video performance of VPC and Virtual Server to be woeful - often resorting instead to remote desktop-ing to it.  It also doesn't handle a multi-monitor setup very well either - I watched in amusement the other day as my colleague booted up this VM in full screen mode, only to have the left-hand monitor switch to 640x480, causing all his icons to move around.  When I full-screen a VMWare VM using the console, it does nothing of the sort.

Anyway - to the point of this post:  getting this VPC up and running as a VMWare VM.

First, ironically enough, you're going to need VPC installed somewhere, as you need to boot it up and then remove Virtual Machine Additions - when these are installed on a VM hosted inside VMWare, they cause major problems that you can't really fix very easily.  Shut down the VPC.

Next, go and download VMWare Converter - it's only 30Mb - open the app.

• Click on the toolbar button "Convert Machine...".
• When prompted for the 'Source Type', select 'Other'
• On the next page, you browse to the .VMC file of the VPC from Microsoft.
• The next page asks you what to do with the hard disks - leave it at the default option 'Convert all disks and maintain size'
• The next stage is to select the target machine.  The hardware version should be Workstation 6.x (hardware version 6 in VMWare Server terms).  I don't know if the VM converts properly into earlier hardware versions - so if you're using VMWare Server 1, I can't guarantee it'll work.
• On the 'VM Options' tab, leave the disk-conversion options at their default 'Import and convert (full-clone)'.
• On to 'Networks' - Microsoft mentions in the FAQ (available from the link above) that you shouldn't attempt to connect the thing to the network.  So change the number of NICs to 0.
• On the final tab, you can leave all these options unchecked.  On the one that I've been playing with, I did check the 'Install VMWare Tools' checkbox - however it didn't do anything.  More on that in a moment.

Start the conversion.  Now - on my machine this took about an hour and rendered it practically useless during that time.  I'm running a Quad Core with 4Gb Ram - and for the last 30 minutes of the operation my available memory would zap down to 0Gb, and then go back up to 900Mb or so before decreasing again.  Looking at the Task manager, none of the running processes' memory usage could account for this.  I can only assume it's because the conversion is running inside a service, and is possibly causing a memory footprint that doesn't register as 'normal' memory - could be kernel memory.  The system cache memory usage was up to 3.5Gb (it usually hovers around 800Mb on my dev box) - so I'm wondering if it's memory usage associated with disk caching - after all the service is cloning 22Gb of data (and I have advanced performance switched on on my SATA drives).

Once the operation is complete, add the machine to your VMWare Server 2 inventory.  Up the memory to 1Gb minimum - or 1.5Gb if you can spare it, any more is a bonus.  MS recommends that you then manually configure the page file to 1.5 the size of the memory you allocate.

You can also upgrade the hardware again from version 6 to version 7 .

Once the machine is up and running, install VMWare tools, and away you go!

Already I'm liking some of the R#/Refactor features that they've adopted into the C# editor, the text selection box is now inexplicably rounded and shaded(!), as I get a chance to play around with other features I shall post my thoughts.

Beware though - it's very very flaky!