This known issues list is a must-see reference for many oddities you might encounter with Visual Studio 2005 and/or .NET Framework 2.0:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/knownIssues/
Microsoft may be an awesome technology company, but they have often managed to screw up licensing and major marketing efforts. Remember when they thought that every product name should have .NET attached to it? Remember ActiveX? How about Licensing 6 and Software Assurance?
Astonishingly, they have completely botched the Visual Studio 2005 licensing model. I don’t even know where to begin.
First off, Microsoft partners, accustomed to getting almost any software they want, are the first casualty. Certified Partners receive only VS 2005 Professional, sans unit testing, static code analysis, deployment designer and more. Even a Gold Certified Partner only gets VS 2005 for Software Developers. Neither one gets Team Suite, let alone Team System. OK, they get a TRIAL version of Team Suite, for what that’s worth.
The incredibly confusing product names are the second part of the mess. Express, Professional, for Software Developers, for Architects, for Testers, Team Suite, Team System, each and every one a different SKU with different features included. Who signed off on this disaster? No one can understand what’s what without elaborate charts and pictures.
My current client was excited to move to VS 2005, but the managers certainly didn’t have time to negotiate this licensing maze. Fortunately, I discovered that they were about to order the wrong product SKUs and corrected their confusion on what was what in the product line. Imagine this scenario repeating itself across the globe.
Shame on Microsoft’s marketing department for this, the biggest Visual Studio launch in the history of Microsoft!
It is a pain to install VS 2005 in a Virtual PC due to limitations of Virtual PC itself. If you have a physical DVD, you cannot use it to directly install VS 2005 in the VM. If you mount an ISO file into Virtual PC, you also cannot use it to install VS 2005. Virtual PC 2004 SP1′s mounting capability only extends to 2.2 GB volumes.
Instead, you need 1) CDs, or 2) you need to copy the DVD or ISO to your local hard drive, share the folder into the VM, and install from there. Or, a third option is to mount the ISO with any third party ISO mounting software, share the drive into the VM, and install from the shared drive.
My suspicions were correct: it is a threading bug, and it turns out that the steps are even simpler:
The background discovery thread tries to access the TreeView control in the browse dialog, which no longer exists since you closed it. Oops. I’m not sure how this one got past QA. I passed the info on to friends in the SQL Server group, and probably ruined their days.
You’ll find when you run the Visual Studio 2005 install that you are unable to change the install path. The help will tell you it’s due to dependencies on VS 2005 Premier Partner Edition, but doesn’t indicate how or where you got that. Now you know!
It’s also interesting to note that SQL 2005 includes no less than three variants of the Visual Studio 2005 IDE codebase. One is SQL Server Management Studio, another is the Database Engine Tuning Advisor and the third is the aforementioned VS 2005 Premier Partner Edition. At some point in the VS 2005 development cycle, the SQL 2005 group took a cut of the IDE code and made it their own. The most similarities are in Management Studio, but if you compare it with the VS 2005 IDE you’ll notice slightly different menu items and behaviors.
I assume that the development groups had a good reason (release date??) to diverge these huge IDE codebases, but it seems like they created a mess for themselves.