I don't know if it's happened to you but many people I know have been unable to successfully install the March Community drop. One is a Microsoft RD and another is a .NET MVP and another is just a really smart cookie. Then there's me but it's no surprise that I had trouble. :)
Anyways, here's what I did to eventually get the darn thing to install. Hope this will help anyone out there with the same trouble.
The CD I am using is the disc that we were given at the recent MVP Summit in Redmond. Others that are having problems were using the download from MSDN. They tried burning it to a disk, extracting it to a hard drive and running setup from there, creating an ISO image and mounting that. Nothing seemed to work.
Here's what I did:
- Install XP inside a VPC. Apply all the patches and reccommended updates from Windows Update. That's my baseline.
- Enable undo disk support so if it bombs you just abandon the changes instead of having to format and start again.
- Install MDAC 9 from the preview CD in <drive>:\wcu\MDAC9\MDAC.msi
- Reboot.
- Install the .NET Framework 2.0 from the CD <drive>:\wcu\dotNetFramework\dotnetfx.exe. I had some trouble with this one. You may have to copy it to your desktop to get it to run.
- Install the JSharpRedistCore from the CD <drive>:\wcu\JSharpRedistCore\vjredist.exe
- Reboot (just because)
- Run <drive>:\setup.exe
- I deselected the following items in the setup program:
- C++ - I don't use it and it takes up a tonne of space
- J# - again, I don't use it so why bother to install it
- Under Visual Basic.NET and C# deselect the Smart Client stuff. One error I got was about a missing or corrupt file _13246_NETCF2_Diagnostics.msm.cab (I think, it was one of the compact framework files anyhow)
That did it. The install ran perfectly from that point on. You'll have to pretty much ignore what it says it found already installed and what it will install. For example, it says that it found the .NET Framework 2.0 installed THREE times! It will also tell you that it is going to install MDAC and the JSharp redist core too even though you have installed them already. At one point, it told me it was going to install the Windwos 2003 SP1?!? The reboot in Step 7 above seemed to clear this out.
Of course, if you want to do the Compact Framework stuff, you are pretty much screwed.
I realize that this is Alpha and as such comes with the disclaimer that it will have “issues“ but at the very least one could expect that the darn thing will install.
Anyhow, I'm up and running with it now so I hope this will help you out.
Dave
Just because I can...