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,