A Few Orcas Beta 1 Install Gotchas
If you are like me and have chosen to install Orcas Beta 1 versus just using the VPC let me give you a few gotchas that I ran into and what I did to fix them. The list below will outline the issues I ran into in chronological order and then I'll go into more detail and provide my resolution:
My initial attempt was against a seasoned machine that had Office 2007, Visual Studio 20005 and a range of other things. There is no telling what was or had been installed on that image. I kept getting an error when it got to the .NET 2.0 SDK installation. Of course, this was already installed. I uninstalled the framework and tried again. Still no dice. Looking for a reason to not use this VM I rapidly took this opportunity and reimaged to a fresh version of Vista. I never had the .NET 2.0 SDK install issue again.
I was now on a nice fresh image of Vista. Just as I had taken the first opportunity to justify myself in spending the time to create a new Vista virtual machine image I also took this opportunity to give VMware 's Workstation 6 a try. I mapped the path containing the install files from my host system (Vista) to a mapped drive on my VM (\\.host\shared folders) became drive o: ). I ran the install and it had great difficulty early on and reported that it could not open vs_setup on \\.host\shared folders\orcas install. Maybe it was the space in the name, maybe it was a mapped drive, maybe it was a mapped drive under VMware. I'll never know. I copied the files from drive o: to a 'e:\orcas install'. This is a local secondary drive for the machine. The following is the error in the log when I tried to run it from the mapped drive - notice that it doesn't report 'o:\orcas install\vs_setup.msi' but the network path:
[06/09/07,05:59:39] MSITOSIT: [2] CRootComponent::SetManager() - The Windows Installer package:
\\.host\shared folders\orcas install\vs_setup.msi could not be opened.
I now have the install files on a local drive and kick off the setup again. It craps out in the same place as before. When I look at the log it has the exact same message:
[06/09/07,05:59:39] MSITOSIT: [2] CRootComponent::SetManager() - The Windows Installer package:
\\.host\shared folders\orcas install\vs_setup.msi could not be opened.
But wait a minute! I ran setup from 'e:\orcas install' not the mapped drive why is it looking somewhere else. Must be something cached.
I rebooted and kicked off the install from the e: drive again. Same results. So I went to %temp% and blew away all the files. There were some related to the install. Obviously even after the reboot it was using info from the temp location and thus still using the path from the prior install attempt. I ran setup from the e: drive and it made it past that sticky spot.
The install ran along for a bit. It installed Microsoft Web Designer Tools without fail and as it moved on to install .NET Framework 3.5 SDK the following window would come up it would then run for a while longer and fail. You can click through the image below to see a higher quality capture
I assume it was rolling back is why it ran awhile after the window came up. The windows looks like a window that would appear when we pass a bad parameter or incomplete parameter list to a command. I would then get the window you see below with all the pretty failed icons (again click through if you really like to see red x's):
I dutifully clicked to view the error log and guess what the log file had to say:
[06/09/07,06:52:41] Microsoft .NET Framework v3.5: [2] Error code 87 for this component means "The parameter is incorrect."
Yep, looks like some sort of parameter passing issue. I had been installing everything onto the e: drive versus the primary OS (c:) drive. So I let it use the defaults and tried again. Same results. After a few more attempts with the same results (not sure why I expected differing results from the exact same action and environment) I downloaded the .NET 3.5 SDK from the web and did an install of the SDK.
I then kicked off my Visual Studio Install it reported the SDK existed already. Good. It zoomed right on through and installed everything else without fail. Well, as far as I know for now it worked without fail. I have yet to run Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 and see if how it performs. But this is what it showed me on completion:
BTW--- It's now officially known from Microsoft as Visual Studio 2008. So if anyone has these issues I hope this helps. I have to get over to http://connect.microsoft.com and log my issues.
Now- where to begin in my use and just in time for the Beta 2 to appear.