Beta induced Psychosis.
If you live in the Greenville area and you see some goofy looking guy that resembles me, run for it. I'm about at my wits end. Last week, I had all my demo stuff ready for code camp. I bought a new USB Drive, installed a clean build of Magneto and the latest VS, and life was dandy. Until I got to code camp. I fired up my virtual machine, started visual studio.. so far so good, and then it just went away. No errors. No feedback, nothing in the event log - nothing, it just goes away.
Totally different machine, I have Beta 2 installed and pull down the newest bits for Winfx to finish the chapters I'm working on. Clean install, all works well, then I reboot. Try to start up again, Nada. This same sh1t happened before the Reston code camp but fortunately, I got everything re-installed.
Today, I'm running through, prepping for my webcast tomorrow.... (not in virtual machine), Visual Studio starts up and then Kaboom. Now, to add f~cking insult to injury, I created a picture of the error message. However if I use Windows Explorer to try to copy it, then Windows Explorer just crashes....At least Visual Studio throws up the error message so I KNOW something is wrong (actually, I know something is wrong with Sql Server too, it's just that I have to infer it)
Sql Server 2005 CTP - well, it's there, but every time I click on it now, it starts up, the splash screen starts, and bye bye. No error, no nothing.
I thought it *could* be me, but this crap has happened on 4 different machines so far. Every time a new beta comes out, it's like a guarantee that I'm going to have my blood pressure up for a few days. This crap happens on clean installs as well so I honestly don't know WTF is going on. However I honestly think I'm going to have a quarantine machine that I use for demos and book stuff, then I just don't install anything new on it (which will work fine until I need to demo or write about a new feature.).
I know I know, everyone else has 0 problems with installs when they use a clean VM- but VS must just hate me or something b/c it's happening on every frigging machine I can get my hands on. I normally don't reboot my machines more than once every few months, but I've rebooted like 200 f~~~~~king times already and I'm about to go nuts.
Rumor has it too that either the ASP.NET or C# MVPS get terminal service access to the newest builds. I'm just about willing to sell my soul to be able to have access like that!
Seriously, if getting new betas to work is going to be so difficult, they ought not to half step and go all the way - include a bottle of Whiskey and a Loaded Glock with each DVD distribution