*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Finally Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is installed.  I’ve been through hell trying to get it installed on Vista.  I’ve ran the setup program probably 15 times only to have the .Net framework 3.5 installation stopped. 

I spent countless hours reading blogs, forums and error codes trying to get it installed.  In the end I think the majority of the problem was a bad DVD.  Yes, I am once again haunted by a bad DVD burn from a validated ISO. 

My fix was to first install .Net 3.5 Beta 2 release by itself since this appeared to be the major hurdle most people had problems with during the install.  I figured if I could get the 3.5 framework installed then I *should* be on my way.  After I had this installed I got an I/O error half-way through the web designer tool install.  To remove the I/O and DVD burn problem I mounted the ISO over the network via Virtual CloneDrive and everything installed. 

Once Visual Studio 2008 was installed I had to download the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008 since the previous download did not include the team foundation server client.  To install the client I ran a custom setup and chose the client.  Why this is not integrated with the original install I have no idea. 

I’ll be digging into VS2008 with Smart Clients pretty heavily and look forward to finally running VS2008 outside of a virtual machine.  For those wondering if VS2008 will take over as my daily IDE for development the answer is no, not yet.