Today Microsoft announced the release of Visual Studio 2008. I was on the MSDN servers as soon as I heard about the release and an hour later I had the Visual Studio Team Suite ISO on my computer. This should be a simple install but I’d installed the last VS beta on my laptop. That means I need to be careful and do everything right or I might have trouble later.
Normally I NEVER install betas on my laptop. Instead I put them on virtual images and run them from a second hard drive. That didn’t work too well for my WPF classes and conference talks though. Running a virtual machine with a virtual video card and then showing WPF applications is slow. Since I couldn’t show the power of WPF in a virtual machine I installed the VS 2008 beta on the laptop earlier this year.
Uninstalling
I mounted the ISO and looked for a Readme file. I found one, but it didn’t have any interesting information regarding uninstalling the beta bits. A bit of searching on the Internet turned up this useful uninstall page.
First I uninstalled Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite Beta. That took a long time, a couple hours to run. The installer periodically popped up dialogs asking me to close certain windows. Twice it informed me to close an application with a number for a name (8456, 4265). Running Task Manager didn’t show any process with that name so after the uninstall completed I restarted Vista just to be safe.
Next I walked through the recommended list of applications to uninstall and removed each from my computer.
- MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta
- Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5
- Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Design Tools
- Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 for Devices
- Microsoft Visual Studio Performance Collection Tools
- Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Pocket PC
- Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK R2 for Smartphone
- Crystal Reports 2007
- Visual Studio Asset System
- Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component / Microsoft Web Designer Tools
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Runtime
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Runtime Language Pack (non-English editions only)
- Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime 3.0
- Microsoft Document Explorer
- Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 Language Pack (non-English editions only)
- Microsoft Device Emulator 3.0
- Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5
- Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP1
- .NET Framework 2.0 SDK
- Microsoft Visual Studio Codename Orcas Remote Debugger
- Microsoft Visual Studio 64bit Prerequisites Beta (64-bit platforms only)
- Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
Vista’s ever-present search really helped. I didn’t have to look through the entire list of installed apps. Just type a few letters of the name of the application and wait for search to show me a filtered list of candidates.
Luckily the uninstall of Visual Studio 2008 removed most of the list of applications. I only needed to run about 6 more uninstalls. Then I restarted Vista again, just to be sure, and I am ready to install the RTM.
Installing the RTM
The install was smooth. Took the normal 90 minutes to install VS 2008 and the MSDN help. Ran Visual Studio and everything looks great. Coming up, a post on the WPF development environment. Did Microsoft fixed all the complaints about the WPF designer? Stay tuned.
-Walt Ritscher
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The numbers you’re refering to (‘please close this app to continue uninstall’) can be found using the taskmanager: they’re the process ids of applications or processes that are still running.
You need to add the PID column ( View / Select Columns) to see it though.
In my case there was a windows update setup in progress which should have been finished first.
Good article though!