The hassle of installing VS 2008
- 2 minutes read - 300 words… or rather: good things come to those who wait.
Yesterday, I planned to install Visual Studio 2008 on a Vista machine. Sounds like not much of a challenge, but the problem was that I previously installed VS 2008 Beta2. I knew that there might be things to consider, so I followed Scott Guthrie’s blog post where he describes all necessary steps to uninstall VS 2008 Beta2 before installing the VS 2008 Final Release. During uninstall everything went just fine. So, I started VS 2008 setup. It first installed .NET Framework 3.5 which seemed to be okay. But then suddenly the setup stopped without any reason or error message.
I immediately tried to search for possible problems with VS 2008, vista, etc. One of the suggestions was to install .NET Framework 3.5 manually by downloading the full setup from Microsoft. I tried this without any luck, but luckily I now got an error message saying:
Installation failed for component Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0SP1
Interesting … why does it try to install SP1 for .NET Framework 3.0? Okay, I found out that SP1 for 3.0 is included in .NET Framework 3.5.
But, why does it fail? I then tried to install SP1 for .NET Framework 3.0 manually, without any luck. I really could not find a possible solution to the issue. It was just some kind of serendipity that I noticed the knowledge base number KB929300 for SP1 of .NET Framework 3.0. I checked up my already installed updates and found out that this update is already installed.
I uninstalled this update and tried to install .NET Framework 3.5 again. Here you go … now I was able to install it. I then started VS 2008 setup again and everything worked just fine.
… good things come to those who try 