I finished creating my virtual pc install for testing the betas of all the stuff I picked up at TechEd. I've got Windows Server 2003 R2, with IIS 6, SharePoint, SQL Server 2005, and Visual Studio 2005. I tried to get Visual Studio Team Server installed on it as well, but I had some problems with the data tier. Looking at other people's experience, this may be due to the beta not being very happy on a virtual machine...or could be because I missed a step. If you're installing VSTS, do it on a fresh box and follow the installation guidelines exactly! Be sure you use the latest install doc, too (not the one on the CD).
After I was done I 7zip-ed up the VHD so I can take the image to work. That got the 10GB VHD down to 3.3GB, small enough to fit on a DVD. Now I can actually start playing with the new stuff!
On a side note, I've added google ads to this site (in case you missed the screaming orange box to the left). I'm curious how they'll do...this site probably doesn't get enough traffic t o generate any money. We'll see. I was hoping the ads would be more programming-related. So far all I've seen are ads for blogging and ask jeeves. Maybe google needs to index my site first, to see what the content relates to. Hmm, I'd better check to make sure it's ok to have google ads on geekwithblogs.net...