Hi,

Today I installed Visual studio 2008 release version. But truly speaking the installation was not as smooth as I thought it could have been. So I decided to talk about one specific problem that I faced and the solution for that.

Before I say anything about the problem, one important thing. If you have installed the beta 2 version of the software (as I did) then you first need to uninstall the same. I am using Vista, so I will talk about Vista Operating system only.

In most of the places you will find message like go to control panel -> add remove program and then remove the component of visual Studio 2008 beta 2. But if you are using Vista and you go to control panel -> add remove program you will not find any option to remove the program from the system over there.

To uninstall the beta version you will need the DVD from which you installed the software. Start the installation from the DVD and select uninstall in the process.

After you have uninstalled the previous version of software you can install the release version of Visual Studio 2008. One problem that I faced during the installing process was that one of the components of previous version did not uninstall in the previous process of uninstalling Visual studio 2008 beta 2.

The installation process asked me to first remove “Microsoft .net compact framework 3.5 pre-release”. But the problem was that there was no way for me to release the same from control panel -> add remove program. I could see the same installed but there was no option to uninstall the compact framework. I was working with the user with administrative power, so the uninstall could not have been the problem with authority to uninstall.

Then I googled for about half and hour to find many solution which did not work for me.

Then I found a solution to remove the component from the system.

To remove (uninstall) the component from the machine we have to run the following command from an administrator command prompt.

msiexec /x {C1EDC2C9-9A6B-4140-A2B9-5D624E2FD6D4}

After this things worked fine and I could install the release version of Visual studio 2008 in the system