Come Experience the Visual Studio Hosted Experience
I've been so busy working on the Visual Studio Hosted Experience (VSHE) that I've been slack about blogging our new release. It's time!
The Visual Studio Hosted Experience allows you to access your own hosted server, loaded with Visual Studio .NET 2003, SQL Server 2000, and lots of other dev goodies. We've recently added lots of new functionality, streamlined the UI, and beefed up the server capacity. Some of the features include:
- Virtual Labs: We have dozens of Hands-on Labs which can each be completed in under an hour. Perfect for a lunch break. These map to almost every popular technology, including Windows Forms, ASP.NET Web forms and Web services, language topics, and more. We're always adding new labs; send me your suggestions for topics and I'll do what I can. WSE 2.0 labs are right around the corner...
- 3-hour Hosted Trial. New to Visual Studio .NET? Just want to check it out? Use the Hosted Trial image for a free-form, 3-hour session. No lab manuals, just pure coding. Have fun and build whatever you want.
- "Single-sign-on." Ok, so I'm borrowing this term from Passport. We don't use Passport here but we do allow you to sign in once to access as many Virtual Labs and Hosted Trial sessions as you want. Come back over and over, we'll leave the light on for you.
- Increased capacity. In the past we've been too popular for our own good sometimes. Thanks to our friends in the BMO (one of the marketing groups here at Microsoft) we have more money to host even more concurrent users. Crank it up.
- 100% Free. (Ok, the lawyers require that we remind you connection fees may apply for your Internet service provider... but you already know that.)
Please check it out, let me know how it is and if you have any ideas for making it better.
https://microsoft.demoservers.com/msdn
Also, for those of you on the IT side of the house, TechNet has a similar "Virtual Labs" experience with Windows Server 2003: https://www.microsoft.com/technet/traincert/virtuallab/default.mspx