Last week I mentinoned that I couldn't get Orcas installed because of problems with the installer most likely due to a botched uninstall of the previous CTP release. Last night while catching up on my Blog reading I saw that Micrsoft had separately posted the .NET Framework 3.5 beta 1 download and by chance I downloaded and installed that.

Unlike the .NET 3.5 Framework setup on the Orcas bits, this separate install ran just fine (no WUSA error!). Once the framework was installed I could go ahead and do the full install which completed without further errors.

Yay! I was not looking forward to re-downloading the VPC bits and pieces, which are a royal pain in the butt. And besides running VPC for me is a waste of time - once I install something in VPC it's almost guaranteed to not get used because things are so slow, and because the interaction between the host and the client is usually so bad even with 2 gig.

So yeah, I'm stoked I managed to get Orcas installed in full (risks and all). Especially now that the Silverlight 1.1 tools require Orcas to run.

BTW, after I uninstalled Orcas CTP, as pointed out by the documentation a number of things in VS 2005 broke, and I had to do a repair install of VS 2005, then apply SP1 and the Vista update again. It turned out that this is a fairly lengthy process - altogether this took well over an hour. If you're going down that path be sure to do this while you don't need your computer <s>... Afterwards everything worked properly except the internal Visual Studio Web Server - interestingly enough after installing Orcas, the VS 2005 internal Web server works again. <shrug>