SP1

As you probably know, the all new and shiny SP1 for both .NET framework and VS.NET 2008 are out. So I waited a bit, saw that other developers are accepting it and installed it. Great, worked smooth. Till I dared to restart. After that VS.NET 2008 designer "empowered by new abilities deployed with SP1" has showed own of it's hidden jams - complete crash of the IDE with no traces to what has just happened.

Google it. And so I did, reading wondering MS responses to others complaining about the same issue, such as "are you having the admin privileges"? Or better "make sure you uninstall A prior to installing C, but make sure D is not there, or you run the E utility to let you know that F is missing".

And I have a question - WTF?! Can't you guys deploy a normal SP and that's it? If there's a bunch of hotfixes, CTPs and betas that a developer is not using, why to let him go through the pain? And as well, why not to puck utilities to remove thins along or at least provide the link and not just on the forums?

I learned my lesson -- develop in a virtual box. At least that way the pain is not lasting for long (a few hours to recover, rather than a whole day to get to the same square you started from initially).

5 Comments

  • Hmm - we aren't seeing a lot of reports of this. What designer is it failing in, or does it crash immediately on load?

    One issue we have seen is incompatibilitties with the PowerTools for VS (there is a new update coming for them that will fx this). Do you have these installed?

    Send me email if you are still having issues (scottgu@microsoft.com).

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • Interestingly enough I built myself last year a new PC with 8 GB of ram and RAID-0 10K RPM disks. And with my new box I always use it as a virtual machine host, I have a dedicated VM for development, a VM for testing, a VM for browsing, a set of VM's for a virtual AD environment.

    When SP1 was released all I did was create a snapshot and installed the service pack on my development VM, after I tested it for a few hours I was confident its stable on my machine and i deleted the snapshot.

    Believe me: Life is so much easier, I cannot remember when I had my OS installed for so long without needing to tweak it of reinstall it.

    James

  • I've installed it on three machines so far and have not had any problems.

    If you use the VS 2008 SP1 Preparation tool it should take care of all Microsoft software that will cause problems. It lists what might cause a problem and allows you to choose whether you want to continue and remove that software or cancel (instead of just removing it without even telling you what "it" is).

    I was using plenty of betas and CTPs on two of the machines and none of them were detected as problems.

    That being said, I still think it is better to test it before using it on a production machine (and by that I mean a development machine that is used to create production code).

  • I think that they need to stop building "normal" service packs and start building service packs that are able to update the product without forcing the user to jump through hoops.

    If the SP requires a "VS 2008 SP1 Preparation tool", then that tool should be included and automatically run as part of the SP.





  • Agreed with Andrew Seven.

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