I think that lots of people are of the “try it first, read the manual last” mindset. I’m one of them, and it recently jumped up to bite me on the rear. I had previously installed the February CTP of VS2005 and played around a bit. Then I downloaded Beta 2 and ran the installer. It told me to uninstall Beta 1 before continuing. I did so, re-ran the install and everything seemed to go just fine.
Then I tried to create an empty project and look at the form. The empty form wouldn’t display and I got this error:
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Microsoft Visual Studio
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Could not load type 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.IVsRunningDocumentTable2' from assembly 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.8.0, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a'.
Browsing around on the web, I found that I was not alone, other people ran into the same problem. Apparently there are a set of manual uninstall steps that must be followed in exact order before installing VS2005 Beta 2. Of course, I failed to do this. The Beta 2 install program told me to uninstall the VS tools, but said nothing about the earlier version of the framework or anything. So I didn’t remove any of that other stuff. I tried uninstalling anything even vaguely related to .Net and tried reinstalling Beta 2. Same error message. This went on for like 3 uninstall/reinstall cycles.
Finally I found Aaron Stebner’s blog posting where he talks about creating an automated cleanup tool that helps us get through the “prep the machine for Beta 2” steps. Too late for me to bother with the tool, but he did have this post where he details the manual steps a user can go through to get the machine back in shape. Going through the steps one at a time, I believe this step was the one that finally made things work:
Go to %windir%\assembly and delete anything with *1.2* or *2.0* in the folder name. Delete the GAC_32 and GAC_MSIL folders as well.
You can not view the contents of %windir%\assembly in Windows Explorer when the .NET Framework is installed. In order to view the contents, you will need to set the following registry value and reopen Windows Explorer
Key name: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion
Value name: DisableCacheViewer
Data type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 1
Note: You should remove the DisableCacheViewer value after you complete this step because this is only used for debugging purposes.
I had two different versions of the 2.0 framework, and I think that something, somewhere was conflicting. I know that shouldn’t happen thanks to .Net’s stand-beside ability. I have no proof that this was the magic bullet to the problem (other than everything works now). I just thought I’d throw this info online because it deserves to be easy to find online.
— Matt Ranlett
posted with BlogJet