MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

This week with the RTM of VS2008 I made the move from the Beta 2 version of VS2008 to the RTM version.  Since I have a few machines to do this on, I have been looking for a little more automated way to go.  One of the things I found with Beta 2 was you had to uninstall a bunch of stuff one a time and it was a bit of a pain.  If you had Beta 2 or earlier you need to make sure to get it cleaned up prior to installing RTM.

Official advice for upgrading can be found here.  It just gives you a list of what to remove and the order... You can also get support in the VS Install Forum here.

 If you are like me and hate the idea of manually doing the uninstall one at a time you might want to check out Marcel's uninstall script.  I have used it a few times and it worked great.  You can find it here.  I did find when I used it I still had a couple of items left, but it sure made it simpler.

One package that might give you problems is "Windows SDK Intellisense and Reference Assemblies (6001.16533.121)"  I had problems on most machines with it sticking around and being a pain, it won't let RTM setup proceed till resolved.  It's not listed anywhere on the Control Panel Add/Remove programs.    Apparently I'm not the only one that has had some problems with it, there's a thread here.  It basically suggests three approaches to resolve, Hack the Registry (not may favorite), Windows Installer Clean up, and Figo from MS suggested using mssinv -p and msiexec /x - more details on that approach here.  At the time I went through the process the 3rd option wasn't around so I went with the Windows Installer Clean up and it let me move along - Probably worth investigating Figo's suggestion if your stuck in this spot. If you give that a try report back through a comment so we know if it works or not!

What are you waiting for - go download the RTM!