Simon Thorneycroft and Jonathan Hodgson

Installing Visual Studio 2005 on Windows XP without SP2

Aaron Stebner explains a couple of little tweaks you can do to install Visual Studio 2005 on Windows XP without SP 2 installed.

I remember when playing around with the betas/CTPs under VMWare/Virtual PC and having to install Service Pack 2 first, thinking do they really require SP 2 or is it just to cut the testing matrix down.

Well it turns out there are not any technical requirements on SP 2; it is more to encourage everyone to upgrade and to reduce the testing. This is important, especially in a corporate environment where the desktop is heavily customised and often lags the service pack releases by 6-9 months due to testing line of business application compatibility.

The steps are:

1. Navigate to the setup subfolder on the VS 2005 DVD and run VS 2005 as follows to skip all prerequisite checks - setup.exe /NO_BSLN_CHECK

Or

1. Launch regedit.exe
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows
3. Change the CSDVersion value to be 512 or higher (0x0000200 in hexadecimal)
4. Close regedit.exe and install Visual Studio 2005
5. Rerun regedit.exe and change the CSDVersion value back to what it was originally

Use the registry option to install MSDN for Visual Studio 2005.