I was a little surprised that the RTM availability didn't generate as much excitement in the blogs as I expected. But I guess that those of us who get excited over this stuff have already been using various betas and CTPs. Aside from being able to start using it in our solutions, the arrival of RTM has a couple of side benefits for me:
- As much as I love Virtual PC, I will be more than happy not to touch it for a while since now I can run RTM side-by-side with SQL Server 2000.
- The same goes for my external hard drive, it was such a drag to carry this 10lbs monster in a separate bag and keep plugging and unplugging everywhere I went.
So now I am running four difference instances of SQL Server on my box (2000, 2000, MSDE and 2005), three different version of Visual Studio and three versions of the .NET Framework. So far no issues. When I was installing SQL 2005, at first I didn't install Reporting Services since I didn't want to mess up my SSRS 2000. After doing some research in BOL I found out that you can run Reporting Services 2000 and 2005 on the same machine under some conditions. After a few hours of work and a full uninstall and reinstall of RS I got them working side-by-side. I will describe how to do this in my next weekly tip (long overdue after taking a summer break).