Desktop Notes

The current release of SQL Server 2008 will not work/install if you have Visual Studio 2008 installed. For those who are planning to try this, do not install SQL 2008 with Visual Studio 2008 on the same machine until a patch is released!

I tried installing the MSDN version of SQL Server 2008 today and went as far as the Installation Rules screen. Here, setup refused to continue because I had an “old” version of Visual Studio 2008 installed.

I say “old” because at this time, there’s only Visual Studio 2008 RTM which is what I have installed. SP1 is in beta at the time of this post.

As you can see above, setup will not let me continue (Next button is disabled) until I fix this problem. So I went ahead and downloaded and installed SP1 Beta for Visual Studio 2008. The deceptively small download (450KB) took an hour to download and install.

Oh well, it took an hour, but finally I’ll be able to continue with my setup, right? After installing SP1 Beta, I clicked the “Re-run” button in SQL setup. Nope, no good. The same error kept showing up. I clicked Back and Next to try to refresh the scan. Still no good. Finally I just cancelled the setup and restarted it. Doing that will cause you to have to redo everything in SQL setup. Even though that’s a pain, what’s worst is when I came to this screen, it still failed!

Great. Well that was a complete waste of 4 hours of my time! So, for those thinking of doing this setup, you have been warned!

EDIT: Looks like someone @ MS has noticed this problem and has posted some notes about it. Also a KB article. Now for the waiting game on when things go RTM. Sigh… yet another MS “release” when it’s not really complete.

EDIT: By uninstalling Visual Studio 2008, I was able to install SQL 2008. However, the reason why I wanted to install SQL 2008 in the first place was to try out the new developer features. Kind of beats the point. Oh well.