Make sure to uninstall VS Orcas beta 1 before installing beta 2

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Before installing Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 or the .NET Framework 3.5 beta 2, it is necessary to remove previous beta versions of VS 2008.  In most cases, when running beta 2 setup on a system that has an earlier beta still installed, setup will block installation and display a dialog with a list of previous beta products that need to be uninstalled.

However, we discovered that there are a few previous beta products that are not being detected correctly.  This means that if they are installed on the system, they will not be listed in the blocking dialog when running beta 2 setup.

If you have any of the following VS 2008 (formerly code named Orcas) editions installed on your system, make sure to remove them from Add/Remove Programs before installing VS 2008 beta 2:

  • Visual Basic Express Edition Codename Orcas - beta 1
  • Visual C# Express Edition Codename Orcas - beta 1
  • Visual C++ Express Edition Codename Orcas - beta 1
  • Visual Web Developer Express Edition Codename Orcas - beta 1
  • Visual Studio Professional Edition Codename Orcas - beta 1

Note that for all of the beta versions of VS 2008, including the products listed above, setup will automatically uninstall beta versions of prerequisites and optional components that were chained in during the beta uninstall process.  This chaining was added in the VS 2008 products in order to help reduce problems we saw frequently during the VS 2005 beta program that were caused by uninstalling beta prerequisites out of order.