it's living outside of a VPC, and generally happy
Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that the Orcas Beta 1 was released a couple weeks ago. I installed it on a VPC immediately, just because that was safe.
It worked fine, especially thanks to some work from Charlie Calvert to update the LINQ samples for each public release.
But, I had carrying around an extra hard drive. I hate the performance penalty of using a VPC. I find that exiting VPC before I put my laptop in standby another annoyance.
Don't get me wrong: I'm addicted to VPC, and how it gives me more freedom to work with bleeding edge software, without worrying that I'm buying a future task of repaving my production machine and reinstalling every piece of software I use.
But I also look forward to the day when I can take a shiny new beta release and put it on real live hardware, not in a virtual sandbox.
For me, that day came last week for Orcas Beta 1. I installed it on real live hardware last week It's on my laptop, side-by-side with Visual Studio 2005.
By and large the experience has been great: There have been no side effects on (most of) my VS 2005 applications. I also converted a number of C# 2.0 applications and they ran fine.
I can also run VS 2005 without issue, so that's good too. And, just to ensure it worked, I uninstalled Orcas, repaired VS.NET 2005, and went on with no ill effects. That's critical for me, and it worked quite well.
Of course, if it was perfect, it would be a release and not a beta, so there are a few warts you need to know about.
First, side-by-side installation has issues with IIS and Vista, at least for me. All websites started using .NET 3.5, despite running AppCmd to point them at ASP.NET 2.0. In many cases, this is good, because I know my web apps run under 3.5. They still use the C# 2.0 compiler, unless you change provideroption setting in your web.config as follows:
<providerOption name="CompilerVersion" value="v3.5"/>
At any rate, what this means is that any 2.x web application you are running will fail if they using any BCL functionality affected by a breaking change in ASP.NET V.Orcas. (No, I don't have an exhaustive list of those. It's too early, and it will probably change anyway).
Second, there are still some problems running SQL Server on Vista, expecially with user instance databases when you are not running with elevated privileges. (I do have UAC turned on, so that may be part of the factor).
But, as I said at the top, it's a beta. I didn't expect to write that it's perfect, but I'm happy to say that it works well, and doesn't interfere with my production environment (at least not too much).
So, should you take this plunge? Well, it depends on your interest and your risk tolerance. I do have one machine that is 'orcas free', for production testing. But, I spend quite a bit of time in Orcas doing research and forward looking work. so it's worth it to me to have a real live hardware based Orcas release to work with.