The latest Community Technology preview of Visual Studio "Orcas" has been released (see Rob Caron's entry), coming in the form of a configured and ready to run virtual machine (while normally VMWare Player and VMWare Virtual Server can import VirtualPC machines, that doesn't seem to be the case for this release. I'll probe further on that, though at least VirtualPC is free).

Note: you also need the base virtual machine disk, which you can find here. Together it's some 4.6GB of downloads -- I wonder what Microsoft's bandwidth bills are like -- though apparently they'll be using diffs from here on in.

Not overly noteworthy in itself, given that this is a product that is so far out that it's of little practical interest for professional developers (outside of saying "neat!", or if you're in the Visual Studio add-in market and you need to develop for it concurrently), however I mention it because I wrote an entry about this form of delivery a while back, and I think it's a neat development.

Obviously Microsoft has the luxury of releasing their own products on their own virtualized platform without all of the legal issues that an external company would have doing the same. Perhaps at some point Microsoft will release a special appliance version of their server products, allowing 3rd parties to release products on a decked-out virtual appliance running, for instance, Windows 2003, and to do so legally and cost-effectively (they sort of do this with the Storage editions).

This segues to another topic topic that I recently touched upon, which is Joel and his Wasabi language, which is a really high level language (so high that it generates code for really high level languages) that he created to generate builds targeting multiple platforms (e.g. PHP on Apache on Linux, VBScript on IIS on Windows, etc). Joel might be better served simply setting up the platform he needs, and then using all of the functionality and capabilities of the chosen technology stack, and then delivering a ready to run virtual machine to his prospective clients.