I recently got my hands on Visual Studio 2008 RTM (release to manufacturing - in other words, NOT in beta anymore) and set out to install it on my machine thinking it would be a matter of popping the DVD in, clicking through a couple of screens and leaving the installer alone do its thing while I took care of other things. Little did I know that there was a world of frustration in store for me.

I came back to check on the install after an hour or so to find out that the install had failed at the very early stages - specifically, the installation of the web authoring tool had failed because of an Office 2007 compatibility issue. So the first thing I did was perform a Google search for VS 2008 installation problems and I came across a number of sites (mainly MSDN newsgroup posts) containing user complaints related to VS 2008 installation issues. After trying a number of suggestions that turned out to be dead ends, I came across a site that provided the answer and a lesson in debugging: always look for log files when you encounter installation problems.

Here's the site:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Office2007WontUpgradeFromAPrereleaseVersio...

And here's a summary of the steps I took:

- Look in "C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Temp" for the most recent file of the form "SetupExe{...}.log".
- Look for the product code of the component that caused the failure. In my case it was embedded in the line: "Catalyst beta product conflict check failed. Office Beta product conflict is detected on the computer, productcode={40120000-00A8-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}".
- Look in the registry for the GUID ({40120000-00A8-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE} in my case) that you find.
- Uninstall the product using Add/Remove programs.


And there you go! The VS 2008 installation should go smoothly for you now... At least it did for me :)

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