Installing Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1

Recently, I realized that a few of our developement servers were running Visual Studio 2008 with the beta of SP1. One would assume that the installation of a service pack wouldn't be too difficult but since they already had the beta of service pack 1 installed, the installation of SP1 became a bit more complicated.

If you download the service pack installation file from Microsoft and run it, you get an error saying that you need to run the Service Pack Preparation Tool before being able to install. Head to the Microsoft website and download the removal tool.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A494B0E0-EB07-4FF1-A21C-A4663E456D9D&displaylang=en#AffinityDownloads

In my case, I ran the SP prep tool and received yet another error. It said that it need some files on the installation disk for Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode) - ENU. The ticket here is that we don't have a disk for that and to my knowledge, there isn't one. Microsoft has a download for it but it's an executable that doesn't extract an iso. I searched around for a solution to the problem and found a site that said to simply uninstall VS 2008 Shell (listed in Programs and Features as Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell...). I performed said action and the prep tool ran fine with no errors.

After running the prep tool, I stimply ran the installer for the service pack with yet again no errors.

The install did, however, take about two hours (ugh).

There you have it.