Well, I’ve been waiting for them to make this available ever since TechEd. They were giving copies away during the lunch session of the DotNetRocks show and since I left during the show I didn’t receive my copy. Since then I’ve been waiting for them to post it to MSDN downloads… like they promised. Well, as of July 15th they have fulfilled that promise. You can download a fully functional copy of VSTS Beta 2 fully configured and ready to test. Honestly I love this idea and believe MS should start doing this for other “larger” betas. VSTS is somewhat of a pain to install although easier than Beta 1 the Beta 2 bits will still give you fits. This makes it nice and easy.
Anyway, what prompted this post was a little thing that I know they just overlooked but I found it quite funny. The ADVENTUREWORKS domain that is setup on this image has a password expiration policy and as you well know if a service account is not setup with an non-expiring password the service will fail to start once that password expires. Well, when they installed Office Live Communication Server 2005 they used a domain service account, ADVENTUREWORKS/LCService, and it had an expiring password. The LC service fails on startup. A simple fix I know but it just reminds you that the little things are what get you in life. I bet people just poured over this image making sure it was just right prior to release. We can’t catch ‘em all.