I spent a better half of the afternoon and evening installing Visual Studio 2008 over my old VS2005. It went something like this:
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Uninstalled VS2005.
- Mistakenly uninstalled VS2005 Tools for Office before VS2005 itself. VS2005 uninstall failed miserably afterwards.
- Had to ‘repair’ VS2005 prior to continuing.
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Uninstalled other VS2005 and .NET components, excluding .NET 2.0, which never showed up on Programs list in Vista.
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VS2008 installation attempts 1 to N.
- VS Runtimes MSI (Runtime Pre-Requisites) and .NET 3.5 installed smoothly.
- Installer then crashed and burned when setting up Document Explorer 2008, with MSI error code 1603 and zero reasons.
- Attempts to reinstall and uninstall whatever it took to fixed the problem didn’t fix the problem.
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Located and ran Document Explorer installer (WCU\DExplore\DExplore.exe).
- Finally returned a meaningful error, turned out .NET 2.0 was required.
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Manually installed .NET 2.0 even though it supposedly came with Windows Vista.
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Manually installed Document Explorer.
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Finally managed to install VS2008.
Well, that was harder than I expected. Who knew Document Explorer 2008 required explicit .NET 2.0 installation?
