I ran into an interesting tidbit tonight playing with my .Net 2.0 BETAs. If you haven't installed anything yet, GREAT. If you know someone who is planning on installing the BETA stuff but hasn't yet, make sure you let them know. After a little playing around and reading I found this out:
<Let me first add here, I know this is beta software, it’s supposed to be a little buggy and a little flaky.>
SQL 2005 BETA uses a slightly newer release of the .Net 2.0 framework. There is a minor-version upgrade to the framework in the SQL 2005 installer. OUCH. I installed Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 a couple weeks ago, and planned on playing with it for a while before overwhelming myself with the SQL stuff. WRONG!!!
If you are planning on installing the Visual Studio 2005 and SQL betas, you have to install SQL 2005 first, in order to get the newer version of the framework. If you’ve already installed Visual Studio, the SQL installer will see the framework 2.0 as ‘already being there’ and it will not try to update or install it.
Supposedly there is hope for those like me. I have read in a KB and Visual Studio Magazine article that you can uninstall the 2.0 framework, and then install SQL, to get the newest build of the framework, and then all will be good. You supposedly will not have to reinstall Visual Studio after this. Microsoft says that by the time the software releases, (November 2005), both versions will be using the same version of the software. I love my shiny new VS2005, and the thought of uninstalling part of it and everything being ok is scary to me. If anyone has any experience with this, good or bad, please comment or send me an email. I think I’ll wait a few more days before I try the fix, and when I do, I’ll post an update here. I hope this keeps at least one person from having to run into the same problem as me, kill .net 2.0, install SQL and then clicking on that VS2005 icon, crossing their fingers, and waiting…