Coming back from the Architect Forum session on last Friday, I decided to play around with WinFX a little.
I decided to install these on a Windows Server 2003 SP 1 machine.

Some road blocks that have to be cleared:

1. Visual Studio 2005 Orca and Workflow extension ... These two are not so bad of a download.  It's better to clear these two first.
2. WinFX runtime... Ugh... I hope you have enough bandwidth and connection time... At first sight, it only requires a 2 MB download, but... that's just the installer to download the rest of the runtime (which is about 50mb) from the web.  To complicate things, I was behind a proxy that requires authentication, blah blah blah. Never mind that, in the end, I decided to be brave (I hope this is not turning out to be a stupid decision that I'll regret later on, but... we'll see) and installed it on my workstation that's already joined to the domain and configured correctly to connect to the download site.
3. Windows SDK... double Ugh... Boy, if you have enough bandwidth and connection time for the previous download, I really really hope you have enough bandwidth and connection time for this big boy.  1+ Gigabytes of data to download.  Yeah!! Woohoo!! (Jump around with joy...NOT).  Well, be prepared to camp your computer 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or ...(you got the idea) more days to download this big ... (fill in the blank) of an SDK.  Uhm... if you are doing Vista February CTP, I think you have to download a different Windows SDK version.  I recalled seeing a download for this from MSDN Subscription site.  I am not sure.  Someone correct me if I am wrong.
4. Go grab some WinFX examples from the web (there are hands on lab and what not from MSDN site).

After all the downloads fun and joy... It's time for installation.

To save you pain and suffering I suggest you read the installation instruction... Uhm..it's somewhere on MSDN WinFX site I think... forgot where.. go dig around...

But if you are too lazy to go browse around, here is what worked for me:

1. Install Visual Studio 2005 (Express will do)
2. Remove .NET Compact Framework 2.0 installation if it's installed from Add / Remove Program
3. Install Windows SDK (If you didn't do step 2, the installation will stop)
4. Install Orca extension
5. Install Workflow extension
6. Install any samples that you might want to play around with.
7. Install XamlMigrate (hmm..forgot the link, go Google it), apparently most of the samples are older ones that will not compile correctly without this tool.  To use XamlMigrate, go read the readme file that comes w/ it.
8. Have fun.

Now... anyone know where I can get that cool rotating photo browser demo that was shown in the SAF event last time?  Nudge 2x Wink 2x.... :)