Visual Studio 2008 Professional Installation

I finally managed to complete the download of Visual Studio 2008 Profession Edition form my MSDN subscription. Needless to say, I have installed it too. I already had Visual Studio 2005 Professional and Visual Studio 2008 Beta installed on my system. I am a bit skeptical about all new MS products and thus I want to keep my existing VS2005 Professional Editions untouched and install VS2008 Professional besides it.

So these are the steps that I followed to get my wanted setup of both VS2005 and VS2008 :

1. Uninstalled VS2008 Professional Beta
2. Uninstalled MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 Beta
3. Uninstalled SQL Server 2005
4. Uninstalled SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5
5. Uninstalled SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Design Tools

Then I rebooted my machine just to ensure that nothing is working in background after the uninstall. Lastly I mounted the VS2008 Professional Edition DVD ISO image to a virtual DVD drive and installed it.

I have found my ideal setup of both VS2005 and VS2008 together in my machine without any conflict. I double checked this by compiling a few programs with both of them, separately. Everything went on smoothly.

All the steps mentioned above are what I observed, the whole thing might be different for you, who might have installed another combination of VS products. So you might have a look in the complete list of all the components that need to be uninstalled prior to installation of VS2008. So far its being a nice experience working with VS2008 for both Beta and Release editions.