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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

A Clean Transition

With the downloads complete for the IDE and VSTS – and priorities not on development today – I have made the full switch to Visual Studio 2010. Having been a part of public and private releases over the last several months I had a laundry list of components that I first uninstalled to make sure the transition was as clean as possible.

Interesting note: if I had started the download of the IDE alone yesterday with the modem speed I had when I started coding it would have taken 2.46 years to download the ISO for Visual Studio. Yesterday it took 58 minutes…and I don’t even have the fastest of connections!

Tear-down List

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By following a set order we can reduce the number of steps needed as most installers take their baggage with them. If you start by removing random apps you’re bound to see more start/stops and reboots.

Below is the list of software that I removed from the system prior to doing the new install (in the order that I removed them):

  • Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC
    • This removed 28 components from the system including MVC 2 tooling, Sync Framework components and VC runtimes
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Extended
    • Required a reboot
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile
    • Required a reboot
  • Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2 ENU
  • WCF RIA Services Preview for Visual Studio 2010
    • This was part of another installer which was no longer on my computer. I had to download the MSI for this package here for the uninstall to work.
    • After re-downloading the MSI from Microsoft the uninstall still failed as it required the .NET Framework 4. Oops! Do this before you remove the Framework Client Profile!

At this point I was ready to install, but still needed to remove the WCF RIA services at the end of the process as it targeted the RC.

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Installation

I had downloaded the ISO and I use Virtual CloneDrive. Installation, even with huge software packages, goes very fast. It is a much quicker process because you don’t have to constantly wait for the DVD drive to spin up/down when it starts/finishes loading a chunk of data to your computer.

There were some changes (as expected) from the RC to the RTM as the installer dropped 32 new components onto the machine.

I was not able to discern from the custom installation options as to whether or not the Visual Studio 2010 Command Prompt was included if you didn’t install VC++ (see my previous post) so I elected to do the full installation of all languages.

The entire install took approximately 19 minutes and completed without error.

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