SQL Server 2008 Install Problems with VS2008 SP1 installed

• Posted by mcbeev on October 30, 2008
• 0 comments

Phew! That's quite the title for a blog post. This week I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my main work machine to SQL Server 2008 because SSIS finally supports C# Script Tasks in it.

So After hunting and pecking through all the install screens I finally got to the main pre-install tests. And to my surprise the installer died on the VSShellInstalledRule rule. This is strange because its telling me that I don't have the RTM SP1 installed for Studio, which I have had for a couple months now.

So after checking out this blog post, I still was having no luck,  and no I have never installed any express editions on this machine.

Now this was starting to annoy me. Other fixes I found, including this MSKB support article told me I should uninstall VS 2008 all the way and start over, or not install the BI tools with SQL 2008. Ummm I don't think so.

You see I work various .Net projects for multiple clients. The headache of uninstalling Studio and re-setting up everything gives me nightmares. And the tools are one of the great reasons to upgrade in the first place.

After searching through a ton of install logs, I finally found it referencing some registry keys (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0) that said RTM and not SP1. Ah ha I thought. I manually changed them to SP1 and re-ran the check. It worked! or so I thought. The check passed but after running the installation it errored on installing the tools.

After more googling I saw that someone had problems with the TFS plugin to studio. That was the next to go, but again the install errored.

So I started checking other plugins and after un-installing Visual Studio Tools for Applications the installation actually worked.

Wow what a headache.

So if you have the same problem the summary is, un-install any express editions, and / or any old plugins to 2008.