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.

Hyper-V and Vista

Hello again all,

Today I built out 8 more servers for our dev team. We have a blade server hosting all of this with Hyper-V. Here's what my picture looks like...

I log into my Vista work machine, use terminal services to log into the blade and open up Hyper-V Manager. From there I connect to the machine via Hypervisor console.

Essentially, I have a remote window inside of a remote window. Naturally, mouse and keyboard key sends are at less-than-desireable speeds. My hopeful solution: Hyper-V management console on Vista.

Over the last year or so I have been hearing talks about how one could not install Hypervisor on Vista so naturally my hopes were already somewhat crushed. Despite the dire situation, I started the search (thanks Google) and much to my suprise, with Vista SP1 Microsoft released a patch (KB952627) to install the Hyper-V Console through Windows Update (thank you Microsoft).

Here are the links (Windows authenticity check required)

Vista x86
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a46d0047-e383-4688-9449-83373226126a&displaylang=en&Hash=gUz0Srl8YL8V57oEvToZsTEga7tWBKPgtjBsGst7kRZwF96bbYMMRWbS3gQJnXWBzg24xhBYw6Zlw3ZNZ8C%2bgg%3d%3d

Vista x64

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f10e848f-289c-4e04-8786-395371f083bf&displaylang=en&Hash=AXftxujSp7eaWx3FURGL1rsoJAoqt0jtSsZfn/Ppq%2bSQXBuWEJ2010LWN8to%2b9azkVXBA/cXS3ONLqYZtBoCDA%3d%3d

Once the management console is installed, you should be able to remotely connect to your server with Hyper-V.

Once again, thank you Microsoft for a very satisfying product.

Regards,

Aaron