Visual Studio .NET 2005 Installation Problem
I was trying to install Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 1 on my laptop over the holiday, and I immediately received an error that said I needed to remove "Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites - English". At various times, this laptop has had the PDC release of VS.NET 2005 and one of the Community Technology Previews installed on it, but both of them have been completely uninstalled, and I couldn't find any remnants of either in Add/Remove Programs. I crawled the registry and removed a few suspicious keys relating to Visual Studio .NET version "8.0" and the .NET Framework version "1.2", but that still didn't help resolve the issue. Fortunately, I was able to find someone else with a similar problem in a post at Channel 9. DanTheMan came through with the following tip that ended up solving my problem:
- Open "%systemroot%\Installer" in Windows Explorer.
- Choose the "Detail" view.
- Right-click on the column headers and select the "Comments" column.
- Locate the .msi file that says "Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites..." (or something similar) in the "Comments" column.
- Right-click on the .msi file and choose the "Uninstall" action.
Now why didn't I think of that!? Thanks, Dan!