After a long wait, I've finally completed the ISO download of Visual Studio 2008 from MSDN. After a slightly shorter wait upon launching the setup.exe, I was notified that I was short of disk space (it requires a minimum of 4 GB!). So I had to do a Disk Cleanup and do some delete/move/copy/whatever here and there to free enough space.
Installation took quite some time, good thing I didn't heed the warning to close all opened apps and windows, so I was browsing through 'net stuff while it was doing its install thing. Finally it was ready! Oops, not really ready as I had to restart Windows. I really hate this "feature" of Windows and hopefully Vista SP1 undoes this feature for good.
So after a reboot, I had to endure another pause as Vista applied configuration updates to the OS (meaning the VS 2008 install isn't really complete yet at this point). When I finally encountered the desktop logon prompt I hurriedly typed in my password (I use the Dvorak keyboard layout so I probably saved about 100 ms of time here) and immediately looked for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 entry in the Start menu.
Wonder of wonders, the thing came up instantly and presented me a blank IDE workspace. Now this is fast. And it offered to copy my VS 2005 settings too, including my preferred dark colour theme. So far so good. I proceeded to create a simple console app project so I can just get a feel of the new C# 3.0 language. Hmm...weird, Intellisense doesn't seem to be working. Then I realised that ReSharper doesn't work on VS 2008 and the settings that were copied from my VS 2005 probably had Visual Studio Intellisense disabled (since I prefer ReSharper's). So I got it to work after fiddling with the Options.
My first impression of VS 2008 is that it's fast. I haven't taken a look at memory usage yet, since all I did was a simple throwaway console app. I miss ReSharper and hope that they can come up with a release for VS 2008 (including all that C# 3.0 goodness) pretty soon.