Visual Studio 2005 Beta Install Woes

  • Article

I was all psyched to install Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 today. After launching Setup, I got a nice little error message

---------------------------
Visual Studio Beta Setup
---------------------------
Setup has detected that previous versions of the product(s) listed below are currently installed. Uninstall these applications before continuing with Setup. For more information, see readme.htm at the root of Visual Studio CD1 or DVD.
- Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites - English
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

Hm.. this was a little unsettling. I looked all through my Add/Remove Programs and nowhere could I see anything that remotely resembled “Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites - English.“ It didn't take too long to discover that I was not the only one reporting this problem. From what I was able to gather, this problem stemmed from having a previous build of Visual Studio 2005 on my machine.

The solution was to run the following command line:

msiexec /x {4DA0DC5F-5E58-4FC0-A508-56E90AC5AAC7}

So, if you try to install Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1, or any of the Visual Studio Express Beta products, and find yourself hitting this error, try the solution above and see if it eases your pain.