I'm sure most of the tech-savvy developers out there have already downloaded and tried to install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. If you did, well there are some important things to note about the installation and removal of Beta products. Let's first start with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. When this first came out a few months ago, it was a huge milestone for the Visual Studio product team. However, as with all "Beta" products you need to follow the directions given by the product teams ver batum. If not, you will have issues that will cause you to pull your hair out of your head and drive you nuts. Also, you may have gotten errors when trying to uninstalling the "Microsoft Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 1" as well. Well, at least it did for me.
For the most part I followed the directions after downloading & installing the first beta release. However, when beta 2 came out 2 weeks ago, I was quick to just on the download and wanted to see all the new and updated features. So, just like any normal person I went and started unstalling my Beta 1 Visual Studio 2010. Well, first mistake I made was not to uninstall in the correct order. Check here for the correct order. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VistaUsersUninstallVisualStudio2010Beta1BeforeUpgradingToWindows7.aspx.
So, if most of you uninstalled in the wrong order you may have some interesting side effects. One of the most painful side effects for me was trying to get rid of "Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 1". For the life of me, I could not get this to uninstall off my computer. I was searching for everything in the blogosphere to figure out what registry hack or trick I needed to get rid of it. Well after completely removing all of my .NET Frameworks and re-installing all of them, which may or may not have helped, I decided to hack the registry myself to figure out how to fix my computer.
First thing you need to is grab a free copy of a good registry tool. Check here > http://www.resplendence.com/ Once you have this tool, it makes it super easy to find things in your registry with simple searchs. Very helpful! Once you have the tool installed, do a simple text search for "NET Framework Client Profile" and you should get a decent amount of results. Most of them will be a registry location [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Classes/Installers~]. You need to find the one entry that lists the "Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 1" and delete it. I would recommend also making sure that in Control Panel > Add & Remove Programs that you have no programs associated with Visual Studio 2010 or .NET Framework 4.
So, once all this has been completed, you probably should do a re-boot just to be safe and then try to re-install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. If you still get errors, you might need to completely remove all traces of the dot NET framework and do a complete re-install. Here are some tools to help you do that. For dot NET detection tool which is pretty simple, check here > http://www.softrecipe.com/System-Utilities/Utilities/net_version_detector.html. This will tell very simply what versions of the NET Framework you have installed on your computer as well the version that are not. Now, you will probably need a tool to completely remove dot NET framework versions from your computer as well. Check here > http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/05/30/611355.aspx This tool will completely remove all traces of the .NET framework from your machine. However, it only goes up to version 3.5 right now. Either way it is still a great tool to help easily remove dot NET versions from your machine.
Well I hope this helps all the tech-savvy developers out there! If you have any questions or comments, please post.
My new quote of the day - "Always remember, use a virtual machine"
