Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Visual Studio 2008 & SQL Server 2005

I made a pretty big mistake the other day. I installed Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite on my primary desktop workstation. Instead of doing the smart thing and installing it side by side with Visual Studio 2005, I uninstalled Visual Studio 2005, then installed 2008.

 

The main reason that this is a bad idea can be summed up in the following picture:

image

Because I uninstalled VS2005, I broke SQL Server Business Intelligence studio. Since most of the code I interact with on a regular basis is SQL Server related, this is a problem.

 

In order to solve the problem, I have to reinstall SQL Server 2005 Workstation components and then reapply SP2 for SQL Server (and the subsequent rollup patch). All in all a pain in the neck.

Don't make this same mistake!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I already did make the same mistake. It's HORRIBLE that MSFT can't even support its own software.
Just too lazy to provide the same functionality for VS2008 that they were providing for VS2005. Or at least a warning during the upgrade process. I too had to uninstall VS2005 before installing VS2008 because of an initially corrupt download of the new bits.

Anonymous said...

Microsoft are plane ridiculous actually, I am getting sick and tired of this nonsense. With every new additional there is a bunch of previous software functionalities that you end up losing only to find out the new version will be coming soon. How soon that would be is anybody's guess.

And guess what, this cycle start all over again with every new release.

Anonymous said...

The lack of support is due to the late release of SQL 2008. BIDS is not part of Visual Studio, it is a Visual Studio add-in provided as part of the SQL Server bits. SQL Server is still not available, unless you want to install Beta bits.

I suppose Microsoft could have held Visual Studio back a full year so that we would not have the stutter in functionality, but I prefer to do it this way. Having to run VS2005 side by side to be able to use BIDS is a small price to pay for having everything included in VS 2008 NOW.

Anonymous said...

I have been an IT consultant for 10 years. We can't get small customers with only a few hundred thousands of lines of code to release their products in tandem.

You expect them to easily aand quickly get the many different versions of SQL Server and Visual Studio in synch? Seriously?! Do you have ANY IDEA how many lines of code and how many different development team all over the world are involved with those SKUs? I imagine they are trying, but it's an awfully big ship to expect to turn on a dime.