Comparing ASP.NET MVC tutorials: OdeToFood, Nerddinner, and MVC Music Store

I worked through three ASP.NET MVC tutorials: NerdDinner, OdeToFood, and MVC Music Store.  All had their pro's and con's, and I definitely learned much from them.  The pluralsight tutorial OdeToFood was, far and away, the best put together tutorial of the bunch, and if you had to pick one, that would be the one to do.  NerdDinner wasn't bad but is showing it's age as it was developed using MVC2 (though I thought I saw something about updates...). The MVC Music Store tutorial also had a lot of interesting stuff but I would have to consider it the weakest of these three tutorials.

Installing Windows 8.1 and Visual Studio 2013 in VirtualBox

I've been annoyed at the fact that I haven't been able to follow along the examples in the MVA courses and other tutorials that deal with writing HTML5 and Javascript in VS because you need to have Windows 8 to develop in those languages (Windows Store Apps). So I finally got around to downloading Windows 8.1 Pro and VS 2013 Ultimate from Dreamspark. Fortunately for me, the Harbert School of Business is a Microsoft Alliance partner (or whatever), so they were free. Whoohoo.  I've installed plenty of operating system in VirtualBox before, so I was hoping this would be an easy process (and a beautifully brief post), but alas, it was much more interesting (read frustrating) than I'd have cared for.