I pulled down the VS 2005 bits from MSDN overnight, and installed today.  I had the Beta 2 bits on my machine along with VS 2003.  I uninstalled manually everything that Beta 2 put on my machine and ran the VS 2005 installer.  It terminated with a message that I missed MSXML 6.0.  I got rid of that, and reran setup.  It completed successfully in under an hour!  Beta 1 and Beta 2 all took several hours (I had them installed on my workstation as well).  Kudos to Microsoft for the improved install time.  I installed everything except Crystal Reports.  I even do a little J# dabbling every once in a while.  Java was my first OO language.

Now I can banish my Release Candidate and get to work with the real thing.  I already have a running list of workarounds for things that I did a little differently in VS 2003.  My use cases are definitely not typical MSDN demo fodder, and I often have to banish the IDE in order to take advantage of a runtime-only feature, so I’m trodding off the “happy path”. 

DiscountASP will be one of the first to offer ASP.NET 2.0 hosting.  I’ll be trying them out.