So for those who weren't aware Visual Studio 2008 released on Monday November 19th.  I got my download started early while the downstream transmission speeds were still above 300KB and it finished late yesterday afternoon, early evening when the transmission speeds were down under 70KB.

So like many who have been using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, I made the decision to install Beta 2 on my main desktop (physical machine).  This was a good decision as I've been using Beta 2 for projects for the past 4 months.  However, now it was time to face the music - would I need to rebuild my box to get the release version installed?

As part of working on the next Version of Professional Visual Basic for Wrox, I have a virtual environment which was configured for my authoring and screen shots.  So it became my test platform.  I started the uninstall of VIsual Studio 2008 Beta 2, I uninstalled MSDN, and as I looked at the list of other products some of which hadn't uninstalled I found several that were from 7/27 the day I installed VS 2008 B2 and I could tell they were related, so I uninstalled them as well.  I then took a couple minutes to rename my old projects directory to "B2" since I plan to rebuild the projects from scratch and I made sure other directories that VS would target were also clean. 

So I took a fairly conservative approach to minimize the risk that it would fail.  I rebooted and connected my VPC to the ISO which I downloaded and kicked off the install with crossed fingers.  The installed started no problem.  Nearing the end of .NET Framework version 3.5 was install my Vista machine asked me to reboot and restart my installation, which I did.  The installation then ran to completion and asked for another reboot.

I then installed MSDN locally and again everything went fine.  So for those wondering installing the release version of VS 2008 on a machine which previously ran VS 2008 Beta 2 seems to a non-issue.  So get out there and get the latest bits and start working there are a ton of new features to explore.