Mark Brown

Nota Bene

Visual Studio 2005

Has anyone really had to reformat their hard drive?

“IMPORTANT NOTE: Technology Previews are not “alpha” or “beta” quality. They should only be installed on dedicated machines as no guarantees are made that the hard drive will not require reformatting once the customer’s evaluation is complete. Microsoft will still release alphas and betas of Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey"). Developers can look to these releases to provide increasing features, quality, and stability.“

Also, I'm assuming that this is a newer version then the PDC version. Is that correct?

Posted: Apr 10 2004, 02:32 PM by markbrown | with 6 comment(s)
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Comments

Scott Sargent said:

I just finished reformatting :) Side by side installations aren't apparently working. It left .NET 1.1 in an unconsistent state, some things would work, some wouldn't etc.. (SourceGear Vault Client was completely hosed) All in all it wasn't a bummer because i'd been wanting to reformat, take a good backup and proceed from there (for general good practice reasons). But make no mistake, once this was installed I couldn't find any way of fully uninstalling. I'll blog about it tomorrow or the next day.
# April 10, 2004 5:38 PM

Mark Brown said:

Thanks Scott!. I guess that old laptop I use for a print server will come in handy afterall.
# April 10, 2004 5:41 PM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

Two words: Virtual PC. This is an inexpensive investment that will save you time and hassle in running alpha and beta software, and will allow you to play to your heart's content without endangering your day-to-day OS setup. Use it, love it. :-)

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/

# April 10, 2004 6:33 PM

Jon Galloway said:

Heed G. Andrew's wise words. Get VPC, do a base install of Windows and back it up. Then install VS 2005 and have fun. When a new release comes out, you can just delete your VS 2005 image, make a copy of your Windows base install, and do a fresh install.

I've had to do several re-installs of VS 2005 and this has made it quite a bit easier.
# April 10, 2004 6:45 PM

Scott Sargent said:

Yeah, I completely agree. I had the time and desire to reinstall. I installed it locally just to see what would happen, I had to rebuild that machine anyways. I tend to learn a lot form the failures, when a machine blows up I try to be as forensic as I can to learn why it did. For me its a good learning exp to do this every once in a while.
# April 10, 2004 11:53 PM

Brian Noyes said:

Got side by side working nicely, there is a little patch up you have to do for IIS to work correctly after install whether you do side by side or not on many machines. See the various posts on my blog (http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes).

All were done on clean machines/VMs, have not tried an install on anything where software entropy has had a chance to do its magic for any period of time.
# April 13, 2004 12:21 AM
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