Random Notes Taken While Installing VSTS 2008

As everyone on the planet knows, VS 2008 released to manufacturing and is available to MSDN Subscribers and everyone else. Here’s some notes on installing and interesting things I found:

• If you have VS 2008 RC0 installed, you will need to manually uninstall everything first. Setup crashed on my trying to do a repair install over RC0. I know, I should have uninstalled first.
• Why can’t the VS setup program uninstall EVERYTHING it installed?
• The Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5 install takes a very long time.
• When installing on an x64 system, why aren’t the x64 compilers and headers installed by default?
• After installing on Vista x64, there are 25 new packages listed by Programs and Features. Yikes!
• Noticed interesting things on the VS 2008 TFS DVD:
  • If you want to install just the profiler on a test machine, navigate to “.Standalone Profiler”
  • Looks like the TFS Explorer is now part of the VS 2008 TFS DVD, the setup is in the “.TFC” directory.
  • To XCOPY install just the remote debugging parts, they are in the “.Remote Debugger” directory.
• Now that the x64 performance tools come with VS, make sure to add the “<VS2008 Dir>Team ToolsPerformance Toolsx64” directory to your path so you run the x64 tools by default.
• If you use vcvarsall.bat to initialize a Command Prompt with the environment variables, it still says VS 2008 Beta 2.
• The very first run of DEVENV.EXE crash! Restarting after the crash cleared up the problem. Whew!
• VSTS 2008 starts up much faster than VS 2005,