Yesterday morning, the RTM (release to manufacture) version of Visual Studio 2008 hit the airwaves as it was released to the MSDN Subscriptions. There was a lot of confusion and competition for bandwidth around the world. The VS2008 Team Suite Edition in English was the first version to appear. It took me quite a while to get to the page for download as i kept getting strange asp.net errors.

One thing to watch out for is where you download from. On the home page of the subscriptions (when you are logged in) there is a list of popular downloads. Trying to download from there will use a downloader that cannot stop and resume (or resume if there's an error). Go in to the "downloads and product keys" area of the site and download from there. Depending on your subscription level, you may or may not have this option if the product related to your SKU has not been made available yet. They are getting up there little by little though. But downloading from this area uses the nice download app that lets you stop start and resume downloads.

Somehow I got a hook in to the pipe and downloaded the 3.8 GB file without interruption in a matter of hours at a steady pace of about 400kb/sec, which is not bad for living in the boonies. I can't help wondering if it had anything to do with the fact that I forgot I was VPN'd into a client's network. Normally my speed changes dramatically during a download of this size.

Today I made the commitment to install it and want to share some recommendations.

1) Check out the README file here and get a feeling for what your particular installation scenario might require based on if you are on Vista, if you have previous versions of VS2008 on your machine, etc.
2) Take a look at Scott Guthrie's blog post so that you don't, like me, waste time trying to figure out why the view .net source doesn't work. (It's coming in a few weeks).
3) While I'm sure there's lots of step by step guidance on installing with a previous version (including a new post again, on Scott's blog) here is how I did it with absolutely no problems and how long it took. Thanks to Rick Strahl who gave me a few pointers (and confidence) via email and then blogged his steps as well.

I am using Windows Vista Ultimate.
I had VS2008 Beta2 installed.

The install notes say that all of this will happen naturally, but I've heard differently, so best to be meticulous and handle the uninstalls yourself!

1) Uninstall SQL Server Compact 3.5 BETA ENU apps (there are 3)
2) Uninstall Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Pre-Release
3) Uninstall MS Document Explorer 2008
4) Uninstall MS Visual Studio Web Authoring Component
5) Uninstall Crystal Reports for VS2008 Beta 2
6) Uninstall MSDN Library for VS2008 Beta 2 (If you forget, you'll get a friendly reminder when you try to install Visual Studio)
7) Finally, uninstall V2008 Beta2 (This step took less than 10 minutes)

And then.... install VS2008

The actual install took one hour on my system.

There were a number of times when I was presented with funny "error" messages about apps being open, but apps with names like "3620". I just chose retry and it continued with no problem.

At one point, I was presented with a message that said to close Windows Explorer. I tried "retry" again, but that just stuck me in a loop. Selecting the "Ignore" option finally got the install to continue.

Don't forget to install the MSDN docs. This took 20 minutes on my system.

The sad part about my installing this is that my two favorite toys are not available yet. We have to wait a few more weeks for Entity Framework Beta 3 which will work with this version and for the Silverlight tools that integrate with Visual Studio. But hey, I still have all that on my laptop, so I can do double duty.