New VHD’s Coming Soon

12/9/2010 Update: These are now available!

If you use the Visual Studio ALM Sample VHD then you should know that it expires on December 15, 2010. This is because of the requirement Microsoft has to ship trial software with such virtual machines, and the fact that the shortest trial length for the suite of software on this machine is 180 days. Since I have been receiving several inquiries as to when the new VHD would be available I wanted to provide you with a window of when I expect it to be finished. Based on the list of things I need to do to the virtual machine, I expect it will be ready the week of December 6th. There is still a lot of work required to get the latest power tools, feature packs, hotfixes, and other fixes and additions done that I want to, then everything has to be bundled up (with three different virtualization stacks), tested, and uploaded to the Microsoft.com download servers. I will provide another detailed blog post when everything is ready. The new VHD – when finished – will last until approximately June of 2011.

Thanks to everybody for the strong interest in this VHD. I always enjoy hearing about how it is being used around the world.