November CTP in December? Is this the VSTS CTP?

Just a note about the November CTP that appeared on MSDN Subscriber Downloads late last week…

This is not the promised CTP for Visual Studio Team System. That will be available for download as the December CTP sometime before Christmas (knock on wood).

The November CTP is as described on the download page (take note of the Note):

This CTP release is intended to give you an early look at Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition and an updated build of Visual SourceSafe 2005 [emphasis mine] . These builds are not for everyone. Because our goal is to offer these builds as they are ready, very little stabilization occurs so quality is variable.

To install the products, please run setup.exe from the product directory.

NOTE: Due to a known issue with this build of Visual Studio, you must select the default install options. If any of the default options are unselected, setup will fail.

What’s a CTP? See this post (Team System Community Technology Previews (CTPs)).