Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 will not install on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

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If anyone has tried to install Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, I am sure you have noticed that installation does not work correctly because VS setup says that you need to install Windows XP Service Pack 2 even though there is not an SP2 available for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. This is a bug in setup for Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 that has been fixed in later builds.

In the meantime, you can workaround this issue by doing one of the following:

  1. Launch regedit.exe
  2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Windows
  3. Change the CSDVersion value to be 512 or higher (0x0000200 in hexadecimal)
  4. Close regedit.exe and install Visual Studio 2005 beta 2
  5. Rerun regedit.exe and change the CSDVersion value back to what it was originally

-or-

  1. Copy the contents of the Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 DVD to a local folder
  2. Go to the Setup subdirectory and open the file baseline.dat in a text editor such as notepad.exe
  3. Locate the section named [gencomp6] - this is the section that tells VS setup to block if Windows XP SP2 is not installed
  4. Change the InstallOnAMD64 and InstallOnIA64 values from 1 to 0
  5. Save and close baseline.dat
  6. Run setup.exe from the local folder that you copied the contents of the DVD to in step 1 and install Visual Studio 2005 beta 2