Here's my experience with the install, which BTW went very well:

- Got a second hard drive for my laptop so I could install VS.NET without screwing up my production drive. At about 250 Canadian Pesos, it was way cheaper than buying another box and I can easily shuttle it between home and the office. Also boosted the memory to 192 MB (remember the days when that was a huge hard drive <g>?).

- Installed Window 2000 Server SP1, SQL Server 2000, Office 2000, and Visual Studio 6 (VB and VFP) SP4 on drive C: (no particular reason for doing this before VS.NET, I just did it). Total time: about 2.5 hours.

- Started VS.NET installation. The Windows Component Update took 35 minutes and 4 restarts (one for FrontPage 2000 Server Extension, one for IE 5.5, one for IE Web Forms, and one for MDAC). Fortunately, I had accepted the option of configuring for auto-login so this was essentially an unattended operation. I got the confusing dialogs John mentioned, but ignoring the message and just clicking OK took care of them. The installation took 220 MB (1.34 GB free before, 1.08 after) on drive C:.

- Installed VS.NET on drive D: (full installation). Setup said it would need about 1.5 GB. The progress meter indicating the estimated time left wasn't very useful: in the first two minutes, the estimate dropped from "19 minutes" to "13 minutes", and it stayed at "9 minutes" for at least 15 minutes. No restarts were needed and it was done after about 45 minutes (so that "19 minutes" was totally bogus). Free space on C: dropped to 895 MB, so it took another 185 MB there (it looks like regardless of where you install VS.NET, the .NET Framework installs on your system drive). Drive D: went from 2.64 GB to 2.04 GB, so it used about 600 MB there. Thus the 1.5 GB estimate was also inaccurate (thank goodness!).

- Following the docs, I extracted the sample files and let them compile. This was not a speedy process: I read the entire .NET Framework tutorial and the complete samples documentation during this time.

- Went through the tutorial and a few of the smaller samples. This stuff doesn't look like it'll be too bad, although there is a heck of a lot to learn!

Doug