I went out to grab the VS.NET 2005 Release Candidate and the SQL Server 2005 September CTP a few days ago from the MSDN subscriber site. The download took a loooooooong time since the 2 combined where over 4 GB. But all in all the site was responding well and I can't really complain since the download speeds were pretty good. Virtual PC makes the installation process so much easier. (I recommend reading Mark's article on VPC for some pointers.)
Overall, the installation took about 1.5 hours for VS.NET 2005 RC and another 15 minutes for the MSDN documentation on my VPC image. I'll be diving into it this weekend so I can update some of my test code that I have written and see what changes or refactors I might need to make. I'm interested in seeing how System.Transactions has been flushed out and in testing the rest of the ADO.NET modifications that have been discussed by the DataWorks team. I'll blog more on these topics and the changes as I get deeper.
