14 DAY TRIAL // Today at Teak Mode I will show you how to install Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 on Windows Vista. Microsoft released VS 2005 SP1 on December 15, 2006. Prior to service pack 1, the Redmond Company has made available VS 2005 SP1 Beta.
An important aspect that you need to take care of is the fact that you cannot upgrade from VS 2005 SP1 Beta to the final version of the service pack. You must first uninstall Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1. The uninstall process of VS 2005 SP1 Beta in Windows XP is as intuitive as possible, as both Visual Studio and the SP1 Beta are displayed in the Add/Remove Programs list.
In Windows Vista this is no longer the case. The Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is not featured in Vista's Add/Remove Programs panel. There is actually a good reason for this. VS 2005 SP1 Beta is actually a patch and Windows Vista makes a clear distinction between the updates and the programs installed. In order to access VS 2005 SP1 in Windows Vista you will need to click the "View installed updates" link highlighted in the image below.
"In addition to the VS 2005 SP1 download, yesterday we released a beta for a download that fixes Vista specific issues with VS 2005 (we are waiting a few more weeks to get user feedback on using VS 2005 on Vista to find any remaining issues before we declare this second Vista update done - but you'll be able to install this VS 2005 for Vista beta patch now to get immediate fixes)," revealed Scott Guthrie, a Microsoft developer head of the teams that build IIS, ASP.NET, Atlas, CLR, Compact Framework, Windows Forms, Commerce Server, Visual Web Developer 2005 and Visual Studio Tools for WPF. A big thanks goes out to Scott for his pointers involving VS 2005 SP1 and Vista.
Once you have removed VS 2005 SP1 Beta from Vista you will be able to download the edition of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista and install it. The only problem at this point is that, although Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1 (includes SP1 updates for Standard, Professional, and Team Editions of Visual Studio 2005), Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1 and Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions SP1 are already available for download, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta is not. But I promise to keep you up to date.
