>Does anyone know what the implications are of installing VS2008 CTP on the same box with VS2005? My understanding is that .net 3.5 works fine under vs2005 but I'm sure somebody here understands this issue in much more depth than I.
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>I know about Virtual Machines but it seems like a lot of work to install another operating system just to run one software package. And what about SQL Server etc.?
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>Advice on running both on one OS or clarifying my understanding of how to setup the VM would be appreciated. It just seems at first glance that if it is going to take a day to get this up and running on a VM it would be cheaper to just buy a box specifically for testing the CTP.
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>Thoughts?

VS 2005 and VS 2008 (from what I've seen) work just fine on the same machine. I've been using both for a while now.

Setting up a VM isn't any more difficult than setting up a new machine. Install VMWare or Virtual PC, run through the wizard to specify how much space to allocate to the VM. Then "start" it - it boots just like a new machine. Install the OS. You can make a copy of the VM image (it's just a really big file on your host machine) at any point; I usually do this after installing the OS so I always have a clean image to go back to. Then install the software you want to run. One thing to be aware of - installing software on a VM seems to take longer than on a normal PC; I think it has something to do with the VM having to allocate/format space as files are copied. So just start it up in the background while you're working on other things.