Microsoft has released a series of virtual images with Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 and 2010 Beta 2 for educational purposes. These images contain all you need to get started and are great for learning and demos (which is what I use them for). The VSTS 2008 versions expire in Jan 2011 so you have a whole year of Visual Studio goodness. The Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 expires much sooner (April 2010) since it is beta software. There are versions for Virtual PC and Hyper V with ones that have just TFS and ones that have TFS and all of the Visual Studio components.

Here are the links for the 2008 images:

VSTS “all-up” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (7.5 GB download, expands to 17.5 GB)
TFS “only” Virtual PC/Virtual Server image (3.31 GB download, expands to 8 GB)
VSTS “all-up” Hyper-V image (7.5 GB download, expands to 17.5 GB)
TFS “only” Hyper-V image (3.31 GB download, expands to 8 GB)

And here are the 2010 Beta 2 images:

Virtual PC 2007 SP1/Virtual Server 2005 SP1 virtual machine (7.2 GB download, expands to 21.5 GB)
Windows Virtual PC virtual machine (7.2 GB download, expands to 21.5 GB) 
Hyper-V/Hyper-V R2 virtual machine  (7.2 GB download, expands to 21.5 GB)

For more information about the release of these images check out Brian Randell’s blog post.

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