Here is a quick tutorial on setting up a new OS for development purposes.  I always find myself trying to test new software but having to wait for countless (days, weeks, months - Not cool) to test the software.  Why do I have to wait you might ask.  Let's just say (NO COMMENT) :)) 

We recently had Michael Kennedy from DevelopMentor come in to give a .NET 4 Fundamentals course.  He was kind enough to share a video screencast of setting up the Boot to VHD.  I always like to have something printed in front of me so I made a PDF version of all the steps required.  He mentions some of the software and tools required during the video so I added an Appendix to the bottom of the document with links.  I am currently using this at home to test out VS2010 Beta, ESRI 9.4 (Or Version 10 since they changed the new release), Sharepoint 2010, etc...

 The beautiful thing I love the most about Boot to VHD is the ability to stroke up your new OS and have all CPU, RAM, USB devices from the hardware dedicated to your new instance.  I have used VMWare for years and I always had to allocate 2 Gig of Ram and leave the other 2Gig so my host OS can still function.  Not anymore!!!

I posted a tutorial to my  skydrive account.  I hope this is helpful if you are looking to get this set up.

I was installing Visual Studio 2008 / SP1 on a new Windows 7 64 bit machine.  I wanted to share some of the hoops I had to jump through and hope it saves you time.  The first thing I noticed was it install was pretty slow - be patient. 

The Visual Studio installed with no problems but I got to a message prompt asking me to close the machine debug manager process.  It stated that the machine debug manager was open.  I did not see any application using it and it did not give the process ID.  I ended up killing the mdm.exe process and everything went like clockwork until the end.  Hope this saves someone else a bit of time while installing!