After a huge effort of continuous two and a half days (during EID :D) , I installed Visual Studio 2008 beta 2
I had lots of problems installing the beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008
The first hurdle was Microsoft Office 2007, which I didn't know..
Any ways after doing some searches I foundout that I need to uninstall it because there are some compatibility issues.
Uninstalling the Office 2007 was not the end of the story yet, as because there were some registry entries you need to mannally go and remove or more SPECIFICALLY to make sure that these entries are not left after the un-install.
I got the following procedure to make sure that Office 2007 is not there in your machine....
1) Uninstall all existing Office 2007 suites and/or standalone apps via the
Control Panel, if possible.
2) Go to Start/Run and type "installer" (w/o quotes). This will bring up the
Windows Installer directory.
Change to "Details" view if you are not in that view. If you don't have
"Subject" as a header, then right click on the headers in the directory,
click more, then choose "Subject" so you can see the Subject information for
each item in that directory.
3) Sort by Subject and observe any items that contain Microsoft Office 2007.
For each Office 2007 item listed, right click on the msi and choose Uninstall.
4) Check Services and stop the Office Source Engine service if it is running
5) Delete the following registry keys if present (the asterisk is a wildcard
representing any string of one or more characters):
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Delivery\SourceEngine\Downloads\*0FF1CE}-*
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\*0FF1CE*
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ose
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Features\*F01FEC
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\*F01FEC
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\UpgradeCodes\*F01FEC
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Win32Assemblies\*Office12*
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UpgradeCodes\*F01FEC
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Products\*F01FEC
6) Find and delete all keys under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
with a valuename of UninstallString that contains a value with
*\Office Setup Controller\setup.exe*
7) Delete the following folders (if present):
%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE12
%CommonProgramFiles%\Microsoft Shared\Source Engine
%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office12 (this is the default location
but can be changed during the installation)
%appdata%\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks
%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates
On all drives remove all folders below the MSOCache\All Users folders
containing the string *0FF1CE}-*
8) Clear the content of your temporary files directory (go to Start/Run and
type %temp%)
9) Reboot
10) Temporarily disable antivirus software and related services
Yet again ! this was not end of the story too...
After performing the above tasks I was able to install atleast one product of the Visual Studio 2008 suite That was Microsoft Document explorer 2008
After atleast 20 attempts I found out that the DVD image (almost 3 GB ) which I downloaded has one package corupt that was Microsoft WebDesignerCore.exe
Thanks to Aaron Stebner of Microsoft who provided me another link to download that
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=90739
I've just now finished installing VS 2008 beta 2 as well as I tried making my first application on it and will update you with my experiences and what I see new in that
Cheers !
raheel Hussain