Why am I writing about Un-installing Visual Studio Beta 2 when it was just released yesterday, October 19, 2009? (video announcement can be seen at this link). Well, in the past whenever I’ve used the beta versions of some of Microsoft’s developer tools, I’ve found that it was impossible to uninstall them properly (or fully) when the RTM version was finally released.
Now, I know that VM’s can be used to test out beta software, and I do use VM’s on my machine, as I did when I installed VS2010 Beta 1 on a Windows 7 Beta VM running on VirualBox VM. But sometimes I still like running right on the bare metal so I will have access to the rest of the tools I need in a full dev environment. Especially now that it’s Beta 2, I’d feel pretty good running it on my live dev machine. But, I was unsure about being able to easily remove it later when the RTM version comes out on March 22, 2010.
So, I posted a question on the Visual Studio 2010 Install and Setup forum of the newly restyled http://www.msdn.com/forums to see if anyone could address this issue.
My question is titled Will we be able to un-install VS2010 Beta 2, when final version is released?.
Fortunately, I got a very quick reply from a MSFT moderator named Aaronru who claims a very easy and successful uninstall of VS2010 Beta 2 has been tested and WILL allow for an easy upgrade path to VS2010 RTM.
The exact reply was…
For helpful instructions on how to install Visual Studio, we’ve published some detailed instructions for installing and maintaining Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.
If you evaluated Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you will be happy to hear that no reformatting is required. Additionally, simple path exists to appraise Beta 2 on the same machine. It involves uninstalling your Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 product and then installing one of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 offerings. Please refer to the following blog post for more details.
As part of our Beta 2 testing, we did test the uninstall of Beta 2 to ensure that the Beta 2 could be uninstalled sufficiently to the end that you could uninstall Beta 2 and install RTM with as seamless UX as possible.
You can read the entire thread here.
So go for it! The download of VS2010 Beta 2 will be available to the public on October 21, 2009, with final RTM to be released on March 22, 2010.
This is correct. While we still recommend using some sort of virtualization for pre-release software, we are also working hard make the Beta1 to Beta2 and Beta2 to RTM Experience less painful for those who want to install VS pre-release on their development boxes.
Well I can't seem to uninstll VS2010B2 at all
I've tried uninstalling all the components..which no longer appear in my control panel…and when I trying to install the newver version it keeps telling me I have VB2010B2 instlled.
Any help?
I am unable to install VS2010 on my computer because it detects the beta version, but the beta version wont uninstall, and when I try it says it already is uninstalled.
This computer will probably never be able to install VS again.