Installing Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Beta 2

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First things first, you can download the Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition Beta 2 (wow, that sure is a mouth-full!) for free from Microsoft's site here.

On the initial welcome screen there is nothing to do but click next. No option to opt-out from sending your information to Microsoft. Hey, it is a beta, and a major goal with beta programs is to get feedback, so I certainly don't blame them for locking that in.

Next, agree to the license (read it first of course).

After that you get an optional install screen. There is only one option presented to me, and it's SQL Server 2008 Express SP1. I'm going to select it and highly suggest you do to. After all, what fun is a web application without a SQL source?

The next screen lets you select a specific install folder - or accept the default.

I'm going to leave the defaults alone. Space requirement shows as 3.2GB, which isn't horribly large. Well, yeah, it's big for sure, but just wait until you see everything included - then you'll likely agree that 3.2GB of space is not a bad trade-off.

Click install from there and a download and install process starts. I show 18 items for a total of 292MB being downloaded, which matches what the install screen earlier showed. What takes up the additional 3GB?? I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Well, the install is done now. That was painless. I have no idea why the space requirements were 3.2GB though. I've clicked around the folders and did a quick estimate around 400MB of new files. Either the install needs a ton of temporary installation space (3GB) or maybe that's a small bug on the install screen.