Installing Visual Studio ontop of Visual Web Developer? Apparently not...

December 19, 2005 @ 4:57 am

I have a test server here that I use to run most of my application tests on. I recently bought a 500 meg hard disk for around $200 and I'm partioning this thing off as my not-so Virtual PCs.

At this point I had only Visual Web Developer installed on the first XP partition because I needed to have a one machine for testing the dev environment with it. With all the trouble I'm having with VS.NET on my laptop I'm going to install it on my faster desktop box and see whether it's still so damn slow there.

Aaccckk... VS won't install on a machine that has Visual Web Developer on it. Says there's a Beta version installed. I don't think so <g>... I suppose Visual Web Developer qualifies as beta. I'd say VS.NET release qualifies as a beta if you ask me...

Anyway, I had to run the uninstaller and it took care of removing VWD and who knows what else. Looking at the install running now it looks like it pulled off the .NET framework too and it's reinstalling that and data and XML components again. It seems it would make sense to make this upgrade process more seamless to people who are actually upgrading.

Another interesting note - in the installer there's a special checkbox for Visual Web Developer. I guess this is the ASP.NET designer, but it's actually not the light weight Visual Web Developer surface. Suggestion: Install the Visual Web Developer binary along side with the full VS.NET shell. If these guys can co-exist (supposedly they do - but apparently you have to install VWD AFTER VS.NET) it's often nice to have the more light weight environement at hand.

The good news is on this machine and hard disk, the installer is chugging through the whole ordeal in about 20 minutes... that's promising.

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re: Installing Visual Studio ontop of Visual Web Developer? Apparently not...
by Peter Mescalchin December 19, 2005 @ 5:49 pm

Rick,

unless you got a really bad deal on a hard drive I think you mean 500GB, not 500MB for $200 :)

re: Installing Visual Studio ontop of Visual Web Developer? Apparently not...
by Rick Strahl December 20, 2005 @ 12:36 am

<g>

Half a gigabyte used to be a big deal, not so long ago. Now - half Terrabyte is almost scary to think about, huh?

re: Installing Visual Studio ontop of Visual Web Developer? Apparently not...
by Pete LePage December 20, 2005 @ 12:40 pm

Hi Rick.

It seems odd to me that you're having a problem getting both VS2005 and VWD to install side by side. I know that both are supported on the same box, and as long as both are RTM, you should be able to install both at the same time.

As for VWD and VS2005 having a different design surface, they are exactly the same. The options in VWD are a little more limited, for example, you don't have some of the more powerful data stuff in VWD, but the design surfaces are exactly the same.

Let me know if you run into problems, and I'll do my best to help you out, or at least get you pointed in the right direction. pete.lepage @ microsoft.com

re: Installing Visual Studio ontop of Visual Web Developer? Apparently not...
by Rick Strahl December 20, 2005 @ 1:12 pm

Hi Pete,

I think they install fine side by side but apparently you have to install VS.NET first. Like I said above the installer for VS would now let me keep VWD installed. I did re-install VWD after VS was installed and that worked fine.

It just seems odd that VS would complain of VWD already existing. I suspect this is a favorable scenario for Microsoft <g>...

re: Installing Visual Studio ontop of Visual Web Developer? Apparently not...
by Nicholas December 25, 2005 @ 10:39 pm

I was able to install VFD Express final, and then VS 2005 without problems..

However, once you've got VS2005, it's sort of silly to keep the express designer around.. :)