Love or hate Microsoft – they have some cool tools and IDEs out there. Of course, who has the time or machines to download all of those cool toys and play with them – not to mention licensing fees if you aren’t an MSDN subscriber?
It looks like Microsoft is doing it’s best to help out by providing something I just stumbled across – Virtual Labs. Want to play with VS 2005? No need to set up a machine, buy a license, etc, etc. Just log on, and pull up the machine. Viola, 90 minutes to go crazy. Want a more structured approach? They offer walkthrough and demo guides so that you can be guided through building different types of solutions.
It’s very cool, and over my cable modem connection was very responsive. Well worth checking out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/virtuallabs