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.