For those of you preparing to install Visual Studio, here are a few things that might make things a little easier for you.

Before you begin

Download the neccessary files

Download the Visual Studio 2005 Service pack 1 installer 

Check your free disk space

Before you begin, make sure you have adequate disk space for the installation. Remember the installer must expand and then you must have room for the installation.

Microsoft recommends your have 6.4Gb available before you apply the service pack

REMOVE Web Application Projects first

If you have previously install Web Application Projects onto your machine, you need to remove it before you install the service pack. This is a very painless and easy step as shown below;

1. Control Panel

   Add/Remove Programs

   • Select “Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects”
     • Click the “Remove button”</ol>

       Remove previous Beta version (if you installed it)

     If you installed the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 BETA, you should uninstall that beta before you install the release version of SP1.

     The way I did this was to append the “uninstall” switch the end of the Beta install package in the command line.

     Eg. **VS80sp1-KB918525-X86-Beta-ENU.exe /uninstall**

     During the uninstall process, I was prompted to insert the “Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Premier Partner Edition – ENU Disk 1”. I tried inserting both the Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite DVD and the Team Foundation Server CD but neither seemed to be correct? There was even a folder called “PPE” on one of the disks that contained the file it was after but it didn’t work either… It rolled back this small part of the uninstall so I will see what happens when I got forward regardless.

     Another thing during the uninstall that tripped me up was I was also asked for the “Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers – ENU” media even though I only used the Team Suite DVD to install the product. It did not work with the Team Suite media and I had to use the requested DE media to keep it happy.

     Installation time

     Installing the Service Pack

     Get a good book ready or maybe an MSDN Webcast to watch. This baby will take some time.

     1. Double-clicking the VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.exe file
     2. Follow the prompts…
     3. Read your book or what the aforementioned Webcast

     Depending on exactly what you have installed, the installation could easily take over an hour to complete. It will also appear that the installer keeps restarting but it fact there are just a number of similar patches being installed in an automated fashion.