I am really excited about starting to dig into Visual Studio 2010 and learn to work with .NET. I'm in the design phase for two "Software as a Service" (SaaS) products that I am going to do in ASP.NET. I'm also looking at creating a couple of small administration applications for myself using Windows Presentation Foundation. Those will be desktop applications (not web based) and will connect to our online mySQL database. Eventually they will be replacing parts of Clarion software that I have been using to maintain this database.
To get a nice test platform for VS2010 and MS SQL-Server 2008 I decided to set up a virtual machine with Windows 7 Ultimate 32 loaded on it. I had a ready made Windows 7 virtual machine, so I cloned it. It only had Clarion 6 and Clarion 7 on it and was only set up for 16GB disk size. The first thing I did was use the VMWare Disk Manager to increase the disk size to 32GB as I figured I would need some extra room.
I had asked around for what would be the best and most appropriate order to install VS2010 (Visual Studio 2010) and SQL Server (2008). It didn't seem that the order made a difference: one developer had installed VS first then SQL, so I decided to do that. Got VS 2010 installed without a problem. Did a full update of Windows 7, which took hours to complete.
Then I started installing SQL Server 2008. Windows 7 immediately showed a compatibility error and suggested to either get a newer version or immediately update SQL Server after installing. Since I was already installing I decided to go ahead and install it. During the installation I got an error and ignored it and everything seemed to be ok, except it didn't install the SQL documentation. Ok, so I figured I'd update Windows and it would update SQL Server. That did not happen and I decided to get the most recent version which is SQL Server 2008 R2. Downloaded it, which took awhile, because it is a 4.2GB download!
At this point I realized that I had made some mistakes along the way. I had completely forgotten to create snapshots of the virtual machine as I did the installs. Now that I wanted to go back, I could only go all the way to the beginning, which was from the day before! I had spent hours on installing VS2010 and SQL Server as well as Windows updates, so I was not happy about having to start over.
This time, after SQL Server R2 had downloaded, I snapped the virtual machine back to its initial state and started over. First Windows updates. Snapshot. Visual Studio. Snapshot. Everything was good, except this took me the better part of a day with all the Windows updates. The Windows updates just took forever - partially because at some point the installer had opened a window with some options and it appeared *behind* the installer. So it sat there for an hour or so, apparently working, but was in fact waiting for input on that other window behind it. 😉
I installed SQL server R2 and now I got even more errors than with the original 2008 install! The install ran very slowly and in the end, there were multiple errors. Worst of all, it had completely skipped all of the management tools!
Back to square one. Square two actually, as now I did have the Windows updates to start with. Now I decided I was going to change tactics and install SQL Server 2008 R2 first and then VS2010. Started with SQL Server and now it installed without a glitch and was much faster, probably took less than half the time it had taken before! This was finally done at 4AM, Tuesday morning. I took a snapshot and went to bed!
When I got up I picked up where I'd left and started installing VS2010. Everything went without a single hiccup. Once VS2010 was installed, I took a new snapshot and went on with doing Windows updates since I realized that I probably hadn't finished with them at the snapshot I had gone back to. That took another two hours, so I was not completely done with this until about 3PM on Tuesday.
If you plan on installing those two, make sure that you can roll back in case things do not go right! My advise, based on my experience, is to install SQL Server 2008 R2 before you install VS2010.
Arnor Baldvinsson
