Opening Visual Studio 2005 projects in Orcas (2008)

I'd assumed that Visual Studio 2008 would be able to open 2005 projects and manage them alongside any new 2008 projects.

This isn't quite correct - 2008 will upgrade 2005 projects, but those projects can still target the .NET 2.0 runtime. There is a difference!

So if you've got a team project where not everyone is moving to 2008, best keep using 2005 on it.

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

Beta 2 is now publicly available.

• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Standard Edition
• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Professional Edition
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2 Team Suite (VPC)
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Beta 2 Team Suite

Team Foundation Server

• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Installation Guide
• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Team Foundation Server (VPC)
• Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Team Foundation Server

Other bits

• MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2
• Visual Basic LINQ Hands On Labs for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2

Scott, Rob, Brian (with links to Akamai), Buck and Somasegar also have posted about this too.

Busted my PC

This morning I thought I'd clean out some of the accumulated dust from my PC at home. I've done this before, as I've noticed that the CPU's heat sink and fan particularly gets quite a covering of dust and lint, and I presume this isn't helpful in keeping things nice and cool.

Things were fine until I tried to lever off the fan that sits on the CPU heat sink. In prying it off, I also managed to unseat the CPU from its socket.

The problem is that the CPU has the heat sink firmly attached to it, and the heat sink is wide enough that you can't access the zero-insertion force lever on the socket.

Initial attempts to separate the CPU from the heat sink were not successful.

I'm confident that the hard disks are fine, though it is a bit tricker than usual as I had utilised the on-board RAID feature of the D865PERL motherboard to stripe two hard disks into one large disk. Because of this I'd prefer to get the CPU back and working rather than have to consider pulling out the hard disks and trying to get them to work in a different PC - even if it was the same model.

Anyway, now that I've got into work, I have found this useful article on removing and re-attaching the heat sink. I'll have another go tonight and see if I can have more success.