After our great MonoVS 1.0 Release, I finally got tired of doing disk surgery and repartitioning to gain more disk space. When I bought my laptop about a year ago, it was state of the art - 100 GB was the biggest hard disk that was available back then. Since the initial installation, I repartitioned at least 4-5 times to increase the Windows partition.
One thing that's really bad about Windows is if you run out of disk space while doing any kind of upgrade or software installation and you have system restore turned off - that was actually one of the first things I turned off to save disk space - it can leave your system in an inconsistent state where it'll fail to install any further upgrades. I run into this problem while trying to install ASP.NET MVC to fix some bug.
This week, I bought an external 1000 GB - and I refuse to call this a [I]terrabyte[/I] - USB hard drive and then completely reinstalling my system. My primary Vista partition is now 60 GB and after the clean install with Vista x64 SP2 and Visual Studio 2008, there's still plenty of space left, but I also won't install some huge software packages like OpenOffice on it.
In addition to this, I now have two VMware images of 200 GB each - one running Windows 7 with both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 and the other one running Vista and Visual Studio 2008. I also created a 350 GB backup partition and reserved 200 GB for future extensions - for instance installing a different Linux version etc. - disk space is not something I need to worry about anymore ...
Now I'm basically running MonoVS "the other way around" - with Linux as the host and Windows inside the VM. This was necessary because there still isn't any support for installing Windows 7 onto an external USB hard disk, so you have to run this in some kind of a virtual machine. At the moment, I assigned 2 GB of RAM to the VM (my laptop has 4 GB of RAM) which means I can only run one of them at a time, but at maximum performance without any swapping.
Tomorrow, I'll do some more fine-tuning of the new system and then see whether we can run MonoVS on Windows 7 and/or with Visual Studio 2010. My guess is that the Windows 7 / Visual Studio 2008 setup will just work out-of-the box without any changes at all, but getting it working for Visual Studio 2010 most likely requires some minor tweaks to the registry code.