The Trick to Installing Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 on Windows Vista Beta 1 and the missing MSXML 6.0 Parser

Both Nick and I struck the same problem so I'm guessing that it may be a common issue for others trying to install Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 on Windows Vista Beta 1. 

The installer for VS complains that it can't find the MSXML 6.0 Parser and stops the installation of Visual Studio.

I got it to work by sharing out the DVD Drive and then connecting to it via it's UNC name eg \\machinename\dvd and then navigating to the "vs" directory and running setup.exe from there.

For some this solution did not work so try the following and probably simplier approach:-

  1. Install MSXML from the VS 2005 Beta 2 DVD by hand see: \vs\wcu\msxml\msxml6.msi
  2. or from Spark's comments posted below see https://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=8a2b5fcc-22bf-4185-8ab0-d2c0d261cb5c

Once you've got the MSXML 6.0 Parser installed out of band then VS 2005 B2 should install just fine:-) 

And all is good!!

BTW and I really can't remember where I read this but I'm pretty sure you need to stick with the offical April Beta 2 rather than tempting fate with a more recent CTP build.

Update 1
Yes, you must stick with Beta 2 of Visual Studio and the Framework - see comment posted below...

Update 2
To run Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) or Communications Foundation (Indigo) you need to install the runtime - on the Vista DVD you can find this under the \support\winfx directory. 

For Windows XP SP2, you can download the beta 1 runtime from https://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/.

At the very least on either Windows Vista or XP SP2 you should install:-

  1. The WinFX Runtime from here
  2. The WinFX SDK from here - which includes samples
  3. The Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WinFX Beta 1 from here - though at the moment the download doesn't work

From very brief search I spotted https://www.therhogue.com/WinFX/ Windows Presentation Foundation samples, tried a couple on beta1 of the WinFX runtime and they seemed to work just fine.

But basically keep an eye on the https://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/ and what's new on the Windows Vista MSDN RSS feed at https://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/rss.xml