Microsoft has updated the documentation associated with its latest release of developer platform and tools in order to provide information to testers related to installation failures for Visual Studio 2010 Software Development Kit Beta 1 when “Next” is clicked during the deployment process. The problem is related to the presence of the RTM bits of Visual Studio 2008 SDK on the same machine where the Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 is installing. In this specific scenario the SDK for the next generation of Visual Studio will crash.

“This is a tad embarrassing. When we cleaned up our installer from Visual Studio 2008 SDK SP1, we removed some strings related to blocking the SP1 install if the RTM SDK was present,” revealed Quan To program manager, Visual Studio Extensibility. This is the root of the problem. While it managed to indeed remove the strings designed to block the installation of SP1 on machines that had the RTM variant, Microsoft failed to do the same for the check itself.

“If you have the VS 2008 SDK RTM and then try installing the 2010 Beta 1 SDK, one of our checks fires and then tries to get the help text to tell you to remove the older SDK. Since we removed the string, the resource returned is null and the strng formatter chokes and throws an exception, causing the setup to crash. We've gone ahead and fixed this but unfortunately, it was found after we released the Beta 1 SDK,” Quan To added.

Microsoft doesn't offer a fix for this issue as of yet. Still, Visual Studio 2010 SDK has just reached the Beta 1 stage and, in this regard, the Redmond company is bound to resolve the problem in upcoming pre-release versions of the software development kit. But for the time being, testers have two workarounds available. Either “uninstall the Visual Studio 2008 SDK; or 1) Extract the SDK package by typing: vssdk_full.exe /x; 2) Enter a directory to extract the files to; 3) Navigate to the directory 4) Launch the .MSI file,” Quan To explained.


Visual Studio 2010 SDK Beta 1 is available for download here.