posted on Tuesday, November 29, 2005 10:22 AM
by
Jonathan Hodgson
MSIZap-ing to install Visual Studio 2005 / SQL Server 2005 RTM
Guessing most people who have installed and played with the Visual Studio Community Technology Previews (CTP) will have already been through the pain of uninstalling and getting the release to manufacture (RTM) bits of Visual Studio 2005 installed.
But in case not, I thought I'd share some of the steps I needed to perform. You really need to uninstall all the beta bits, including WinFX
? bits you might have tried out over the last year or so.
Aaron Stebner has a good writeup on the
offical uninstall instructions and some of the automated tools.
But using these tools didn't completely remove everything for me. Brad Adrams also suffered 'dirty' laptop problems with the pre-release builds and talks through using
MSIZip and MSIInv.
MSIZap is a Windows Installer cleanup utility, available from
support.microsoft.com which can more remove files and registry settings that the standard Add/Remove programs might not get.
I shelled out to the commandline and piped the contents from MSIInv to a text file, msiinv > log.txt. Then used Notepad to find the GUIDs for the pieces of Visual Studio CTP and SQL Server CTP still left. Finally running MSIZap, msizap {package code guid} to remove those pieces.
Whilst on the subject of Visual Studio 2005, could they not have thought at bit more on the splash screen and how the list of installed add-ins/products would look with long descriptions and multiple items. I've still got to use RegMon from SysInternals to figure how why it shows multiple for the SQL Server tools!
