A quick note to anyone who is thinking of installing VSTS from MSDN via the CD ISO images (rather than the DVD image). I decided to use the CDs as they’re a smaller download.
I had a Beta 2 version of Visual Studio 2005 installed, so I used Microsoft’s unsupported uninstallation tool to remove that first. No problems there. Then I mounted the three images of the VSTS media in consecutive drive letters (using Daemon Tools).
Initially I attempted to do a custom installation and skip Visual J# and SQL Server 2005 Express edition (as I never use the former and intended to put a fuller version of the latter on later). This installation resulted in several error messages en route and eventually a failure to install any Compact Framework tools. So I uninstalled.
Finally I went with the default installation. Surprisingly this too was not without issue. . Part way through installation I received the message "Error 1308.Source file not foud: e:\wcu\JSharpRedistCare\vjredist.exe. Verify that the file exists and that you can access it.(Abort, Retry, Ignore)." Drive ‘e’ was where disk 1 was mounted. Note that there’s no option to go and browse for the file.
The solution to this problem is to unmount disk 1 from that drive letter and mount disk 3 in its place, as that is where the vjredist.exe file lives. Hey presto, it’s up and working.
A last note for those who, like me, thought that the January MSDN would integrate with VS2005. It doesn’t. It only integrates with VS2003. You will still need to install MSDN for Visual Studio 2005 separately.
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