VS 2008 beta 2 install failure caused by previous beta version of Microsoft Web Designer Tools

Because of the large volume of beta uninstall issues that were seen during the Visual Studio 2005 project, the beta versions of Visual Studio 2008 will automatically chain uninstall of other beta packages that it installs as prerequisites or optional components (things like Document Explorer, the VS Tools for Office Runtime Components, the .NET Framework 3.5 beta, etc).

However, there is one beta package that chained uninstall was not implemented for in previous beta versions - the Microsoft Web Designer Tools.  Because this package is not automatically uninstalled when you uninstall a previous beta of VS 2008, some logic was added to VS 2008 beta 2 setup to automatically uninstall it prior to installing the beta 2 version of this package.

We have run into a few cases where the automatic uninstall of previous versions of the Microsoft Web Designer Tools package does not work, and in those cases, VS 2008 beta 2 installation will fail.  In those cases, you must manually uninstall the old beta of this package from Add/Remove Programs.

How to workaround this error

If you see a failure during VS 2008 beta 2 setup on a system that previously had an earlier beta or CTP of VS 2008 installed on it, you can use the following steps to locate and remove the Microsoft Web Designer Tools package:

  1. Go to the Add/Remove Programs control panel by clicking on the Start menu, choosing Run, typing appwiz.cpl and clicking OK
  2. Locate the item named Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component and choose to uninstall it
  3. Try to run VS 2008 beta 2 setup again

How to diagnose this error

There are several possible causes of failures in VS 2008 beta 2 setup, and the issue described above only solves one of them.  If you are interested in looking at setup log files to determine if you are running into this exact issue, you can look in the file named %temp%\dd_install_vs*.txt (the main installation log created by the VS 2008 beta 2 setup.exe).

If you see entries like the following, you are likely running into this Microsoft Web Designer Tools issue:

[07/29/07,11:11:17] DepCheck: gencomp320
[07/29/07,11:11:17] DepCheck_Result: 1
[07/29/07,11:11:17] Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite - ENU: Install(): bAttemptInstall: 0
[07/29/07,11:11:17] Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite - ENU: Install(): Not attempting to call MsiInstallProduct()!!!! Baseline not met!
[07/29/07,11:11:18] Setup.exe: AddGlobalCustomProperty
[07/29/07,11:11:18] Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite - ENU: CRootComponent::Install(): Setup Failed; MSIInstallProduct return value either ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE or default.

This log snippet indicates that setup is not going to try to install the main VS product because it has detected that a prerequisite package has not been correctly installed.  The package that is not correctly installed is represented by gencomp320, which is described in the file baseline.dat in the Setup subdirectory on a VS installation disc.  Looking in that file, you can see that gencomp320 represents the Microsoft Web Designer Tools package.