Error in VS/VSTS/TFS 2008 Beta 2 expiration date

Brian Harry

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the Beta 2 expiration date saying that it would expire in March 2008.  Well, for the non-VPC version that continues to be true, however, we have discovered that the OS image in the VPC is set to expire on Thurs, November 1, 2007 – only a couple of days from now and well before the March date that we believed it to be.  I appologize profusely for the inconvenience this causes you.  I want to thank J.Eggers for his comment on my original post informing us of the impending problem. Over the past week or so, we’ve been working hard on this and you may have seen several blog posts in the community about it lately.  Unfortunately I’ve been in South Africa since the 20th without email access for much of the time and haven’t been able to participate in the process/solution.  Thankfully Jeff Beehler has been driving hard to thoroughly understand the situation and describe your alternatives for dealing with it.  You can read in detail about it in this post and others on his blog.  A brief summary of his options are listed here – see the referenced post from his blog for all of the details.

• Do nothing: if you don’t need to use your VPC for more than an hour or so at at time (for instance for demos), then you can probably tolerate the behavior of the timed out OS.
• Upgrade OS to fully licensed version: if you have access to a fully licensed version of Windows Server, follow the steps above and upgrade the expired OS. 
• Use new VPC images: if you can’t upgrade the VPC OS and want to continue to use VS2008 / TFS2008 Beta2 on a regular basis, you’ll probably want to use the new VPC images which we’ll publish early the week of October 29.  If you have data in TFS, you’ll need to follow the instructions on moving TFS servers.

Again, I appologize profusely.  It was absolutely our intent to have the Beta (in all its forms) not expire until March 2008.  However, we did not check the expiration date of the base OS image we were using properly and the result is this fire drill for us and for you.  Thanks again to J. Eggers for identifying this problem early enough for us to enumerate possible solutions before the VPCs actually expired.

Brian 

Brian Harry Corporate Vice President, Cloud Developer Services

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