Although installing Visual Studio 2010 B2 and 2008 on the same machine is supported, Microsoft does NOT recommend installing beta software of your development machine. Installing Visual Studio 2010 beta in a Virtual environment is highly recommended but it does, however, have some drawbacks. Fortunately, with Windows 7 there is a hybrid approach that allows you to install VS 2010 on a virtual operating system but interact with it as though it were running on your host machine.

What you need:

1. Windows 7 Professional or higher for the host machine
2. Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC ( download here)
3. An operating System supported by VS2010 for your Virtual environment
   • While XP Mode comes with an XP Image already setup you can use just about any MS Operating system.  I chose to use Windows 7 instead of XP
4. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 can be downloaded here.

Installing Visual Studio

Once XP Mode and Virtual PC are installed the next step is to install a virtual OS to host Visual Studio 2010. You can find instructions for this here. It is very important that the user you created for your virtual machine has a password.  Integration Services cannot be enabled without a password and no error message is displayed.

“By enabling ClearText in your Virtual Machine, text in Visual Studio will look much better when viewed in XP mode.”

Next, while the virtual machine is not running go to the settings dialog

Make sure “Automatically Publish” is checked. This will allow applications that are installed to automatically show up in your host’s start menu.   

Start the Virtual Machine and Enable Integration Services.  You’ll be prompted for a user name and password, use the same credentials you used to log into the virtual machine.

Finally, install Visual Studio 2010 B2 on the virtual machine. (this may take awhile)  After you’ve finished shut down the Virtual machine.

Setup Host Machine

Back on your Windows 7 host you will now have Visual Studio 2010 on your start menu.  In my case I called the Virtual Machine VS2010B2 so visual studio 2010 can be found at start-> Windows Virtual PC –> VS2010B2 Applications –> Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Clicking on VS2010 will first start the Virtual Machine.  If you are prompted for credentials use the same administrator login and password you used to setup the VM.

After a few moments, Visual Studio 2010 will appear on your desktop.  Any application on your desktop that is running in a VM will have (Remote) appended to the title in the task bar. 

The integration is so complete even the ASP.NET Development Server and Internet Explorer bleed through to your desktop.

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