Despite the horror stories I'd read/heard regarding the upgrade to Visual Studio 2005 SP1, last night I decided to just bite the bullet and go for it.

Had I gone delirious from too many hours of scanning the blogosphere in search of the ultimate How-To guide for upgrading? Was I being naive... or perhaps suffering from delusions of grandeur? Who knows. But once I decided that I was going to do the upgrade, I knew there was no turning back.

How I did it

As I said, I spent several hours scouring the web for all of the tips, tricks, and gottcha's I could find - and that's how I stumbled across this gem from my buddy Jon. In my opinion step #1 (thanks Heath) probably saved me the most time... but I'll leave you to decide for yourself.

Aside from following both step #1 and #2 (I didn't do #3 because it didn't pertain to me as I was installing on XP, not Vista), I was also sure to:

1. Uninstall Web Application Project add-in for VS 2005 (which as of SP1 is included out of the box).
2. Uninstall any/all ASP.NET Ajax (a.k.a.- Atlas) add-ins... I'm talking about any version, beta and RTM.

Now I didn't read about tip #2 anywhere on the web, but I figured that the closest to OOTB I could get my VS installation, the smoother the upgrade would go. Plus those add-ins are so small that the time/energy needed to uninstall and then re-install them was negligible.

Order of operation

One thing that Jon doesn't mention in his post is that running the batch file will actually kick off the upgrade process, so you'll want to be sure to have done any other pre-upgrade preparation prior to running his batch file. My upgrade went as follows:

1. Download the patch file to a local disk (you'll want it on a local disk due to the huge amount of I/O required).
2. Created a batch file with the code from Jon's site.
3. Uninstall C++ from my VS installation.
4. Uninstall Web Application Project.
5. Uninstall ASP.NET Ajax.
6. Launch batch file from step #2.

It worked!

To my complete and utter surprise, the upgrade went flawlessly. It took about 45 minutes for the entire process to complete, but I didn't see a single error message and VS fired up and ran just fine after the upgrade. I was even able to do a little Subtext work last night.

So there you have it... a SUCCESS story!

By the way, for your convenience, I went ahead and zipped up the batch file that Jon laid out, and you can grab it here [DOWNLOAD].