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Installing .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 - My Gotchas

I just finished installing SP1 for .NET 3.5 and VS2008. I thought I would share the hoops I had to jump through in the event it saves you some time. Actually the process wasn't too painful. Be careful to remain patient during the install process though  - the installers churned VERY SLOWLY on my machine, but eventually I had a successful install.

There were only a few "odd" things I had to do to get the install to work properly...

Our friends at Microsoft were very nice in providing a patch removal tool. This is much better than having a doc that you have to go step-by-step to get your maching the the appropriate state. Kudos to whoever's idea this was.

My only real issue was that the Patch Removal tool and the VS2008 installer kept complaining about Windows Explorer and the Machine Debug Manager being open. Since I started the install after a reboot with no programs open the Windows Explorer puzzled me for a while. It reported a process ID, but there was no match in Task Manager. In the end I realized that I had Dave's Quick Search bar running. After disabling this tool and stopping the Machine Debug Manager process (which restarted automatically after reboot) everything worked like a champ.

On the lists I am on I am hearing that some people run into needing the original media and others do not. I ended up needing to access the original Visual Studio install media. I work remote, so I had to work with my IS support people to get the media mounted and available on the VPN so I could access it. So I guess the moral of the story is to make sure you have access to the media one way or another before you begin.

Other than that, all went well!

10 Comments

  • For people that don't want to kill running programs.

    When you get the running program screen showing the running programs you can simple press ignore and it will complete after the next reboot.

  • Yes, the installation process was slow as well for me. However the slowest installation ever was the installation of MSDN Library that comes with VS 2008, I remember, it was really slow.

  • I tried hitting "ignore", but the installer didn't keep going for me... perhaps I hit the wrong "ignore" button :)

  • Tried to download the MSDN Library. MSDN says the download is 2205.9 MB. The VS2008SP1MSDNENUX1506188.iso file that gets downloaded is only about 1KB. What gives?

  • Vince: It sounds like you might have experienced a download failure if it's only 1KB. Note that the EXE for installing SP1 is only 536KB, the installer itself will download the rest of the files required. The ISO is ~831MB.

  • I just built a brand new smokingly fast PC and to my surprise, VS 2008 only took about 10 minutes to install.

    SP1 on the other hand, took well over 30 mintues. Seems ridiculous considering that I can make an image of my entire HDD in about 20 minutes.

  • 1) Clicking [ignore] aborts the SP1 installation.

    2) SP1 installation really ridiculously slow.

    3) In addition to MDM service (Machine Debug Manager), I had to exit Vista SideBar to make SP1 happy.

  • Yes, it is necessary to terminate mdm.exe and sidebar.exe to install SP1.

  • Got to the last part of the install and looked at the event log. Errors in Template (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\Item Termplates\Visual Basic\1033\AdoNetEntityDataModel VB_ASPNET.vs templates) invalid Template element(Template ID)value also other warning events regarding Unknown Attribute (_locID) and (Enable Edit of Location Field)

  • You don't need to terminate the process. Show processes from all users, find mdm.exe, right click on it to go to services, and stop the service (in an orderly way, the way the service expects to be stopped).

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