Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

"In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from." -- Peter Drucker Here is a page with a bunch of related stuff, including a prep tool that will set you up in cases where you had a beta Service Pack installed: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Results.aspx?DisplayLang=en&nr=50&startDate=7/12/2008&period=30&sortCriteria=date   The actual Service Pack link is about the 10th one down in the list, here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=27673c47-b3b5-4c67-bd99-84e525b5ce61&DisplayLang=en I use UltraISO to extract this to the file system, and then you can just execute the "SPInstaller.exe" to start the install. A lot easier than burning a DVD. You can also mount the ISO using the VCD Control Tool or a similar utility such as Daemon Tools. But don’t forget if you ever need to do update or repair, you need to do so from Control Panel , ...

If you got the original Silverlight 2 Beta 2 developer bits which became available around 9PM on the very last Friday of Tech-Ed 2008, you may have noticed that you just recently got a refresh in the form of KB955011 from Windows Update. It turns out that this is supposedly included in a newer version of the silverlight_chainer.exe consolidated installer, which was freshly updated on 7/11/2008. That is to say, the version up there now is NEWER than what you got right after Tech-Ed. I suspect there are some additional fixes in the Tools portion of this, and so I recommend downloading it and reinstalling.  In fact, when I did so, I was pointed to a .vbs script whose header comments are self-descriptive: ' Installation verification script for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 ' This script checks for KB949325 and reinstalls all Advertised features ' At no time should there be Advertised features for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 ' Any features in an Advertised state are an...

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. -- Saki Dear Microsoft: Well, you know the drill. Somasegar has this great post promoting VS 2008 SP1 beta, and it almost sounds like it's too good to be true, yes? I figured I'd give it a shot -- all the supposed new features sound so promising... The "Readme" is very detailed , and it outlines a whole bunch of failure scenarios, workarounds, and caveats. Just take a look at this stuff: Important This beta release is for early testing and feedback. As a beta release, we recommend you only install the service pack on test computers. Prior to installation, you should carefully review the included readme file to be aware of any known issues with this release. For example, this service pack has some known compatibility issues with previous releases, including: Expression Blend (all versions) Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 Test computers? Somasegar has this blog ...