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Error Installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta? Then Uninstall KB944899

Microsoft warned developers on Thursday that if they're getting an error when installing the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 beta released Monday, they need to uninstall the hotfix KB944899 that came with the earlier version of the release.

"If you have the first release of KB945140 installed on your system you may run across an error when trying to install the Visual Studio SP1 beta," the company said in a short blog post on its Visual Web Developer team blog Thursday. "The work-around is to manually uninstall [KB944899.]"

The post then offers instructions for removing the KB in Vista and earlier operating systems, as well as a command prompt for checking the list of patches installed for Visual Studio 2008 and deleting the culprit.

Unfortunately, the advice came too late for at least two users who posted comments under blog entry. "[A]day too late," wrote one user. " I had to manually delete all of them. Thanks for the tip though. I didn't know about the command line interface for the registry."

Another posted agreed: "Yep...had to remove all of the hot fixes before VS 2K8 SP1 would install, which was irritating as it started with about 5 uninstalls before I finally gave up and uninstalled the remaining ones."

The betas for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 are available here.

About the Author

Becky Nagel is a contributor to Application Development Trends. She is the editor of ADT's sister sites CertCities.com, TCPmag.com and Redmondmag.com, and is co-editor of RCPmag.com. You can contact her at [email protected].