The art of successfully upgrading Visual Studio 2008 to Service Pack 1

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Today I upgraded to the just released Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and as I was using various beta versions of the Service Pack and of the Silverlight SDK together with Visual Studio, I thought I should write down my installation experiences.

First, any beta versions of the "Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1" should be manually removed from the system. I also suggest, uninstalling the June edition of the "Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Tools for Visual Studio 2008", the "Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK" and the "Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Runtime". Don't worry, we will re-install the latest versions of all of these components again later.

Now, download and run the "Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Preparation Tool". It will take care of removing any hotfixes that may not be compatible with Visual Studio 2008. This tool would also have uninstalled the items mentioned above, but I preferred to do that manually. Make sure to have the original Visual Studio 2008 installation media ready as it may be required during the clean-up process.

This is a good point to get some coffee. The preparation tool takes quite a while to run.

Next, get the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 downloader. The various editions can be found here. Look for the version that matches your Visual Studio 2008 installation. The "SP1 Readme" mentions possible set-up issues when the Vista Sidebar is running, so I closed it before starting the installation.

Have a quick look in the Windows Task Manager to see if "mdm.exe", the Machine Debug Manager is running. If it is, terminate it before the process starts.

Let the installer work it's magic. During the installation, Vista may pop up the Windows Update dialog telling you that updates were installed and that it needs to reboot. Do not allow Vista to reboot at this time, it will terminate the still running installer.

Once the Service Pack installer finishes - and hopefully succeeds - a reboot is required and OK.

Another item in the readme points out that SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 for Devices Windows installer (MSI) is not installed with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, but it is available as a download.

Now re-download the Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 - note that this new version has been released August 11, 2008 - and run it. It will re-add the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 runtime, the SDK and the Visual Studio Tools.

If you haven't done so before, I still strongly recommend downloading the offline documentation for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 from here. It's a 50mb CHM file that will answer most questions that may pop up when writing Silverlight 2 code.

There is no need to re-install the Expression Blend 2.5 June CTP, it continues to work with the new version of Visual Studio and the Silverlight 2 Beta 2.