Orcas (Visual Studio 9) Beta 1 available

In a preconfigured Virtual Machine environment no less!  From the Virtual PC Guy's Blog:

Here is another interesting virtual machine.  The Visual Studio team have made Beta 1 of the next release of Visual Studio (codenamed 'Orcas') available as a virtual machine.  It is quite a large download - but it provides a relatively easy way to checkout the beta without messing up your existing development environment.

One thing to note - the default configuration only has 384mb of memory configured for the virtual machine.  You will want to increase that if you have enough physical memory in your computer.

And from the Download Page:

Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” delivers on Microsoft’s vision of smart client applications by enabling developers to rapidly create connected applications that deliver the highest quality rich user experiences. This new version enables any size organization to rapidly create more secure, manageable, and more reliable applications that take advantage of Windows Vista, 2007 Office System and the Web. By building these new types of applications, organizations will find it easier than ever before to capture and analyze information so that they can make effective business decisions.
For an overview of Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” and to see the list of features that are available in this beta release please review the Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Overview Whitepaper located here .

This beta release is available in English and Japanese only.

This beta targets early adopters of the Microsoft technology, platform, and tools offerings. It enables developers to experience the upcoming toolset and underlying platform improvements. We designed this release to enable developers to try out new technology and product changes, but not to build production systems. This limitation is fully covered in the EULA that accompanies this beta.