It was a beautiful day in Vermont, and to make it even more beautiful I wanted to install SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 on my new Dell [big mutha of a] laptop. I hadn't really touched it since it arrived last Monday. The weekend's goal is to have a Community Server 2.1 site running on it with the SDK cooing and compiling in VS2005. Today I configured the laptop as a workstation on my office LAN. The TCPIP and networking part was easy after I figured out how to get a login box to display in XP. That was the hard part. Believe it or not, it's my first encounter with Windows XP. My wife and 8-year-old daughter each have XP machines, so I've seen it, but I only use Windows 2003 Server here in my office.
I copied the 3.68 gigabytes of MSDN VS2005, MSDN2005 and SQL2005 ISOs to the laptop and checked my notes from the last two times I installed VS2005 and MSDN2005. Blog DBVT did its valuable work once again (3rd to last paragraph), reminding me to install the two VS2005 CD images in the same directory to avoid problems. (Same with the MSDN Library CD image files.) Everything went smoothly until I hit the SQLTOOLS CD, disk #2 of the SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition. I selected my SQL client apps I would need to use SQL Server 2005 and hit:
None of the selected features can be installed or upgraded. Setup cannot proceed since no effective change is being made to the machine. To continue, click Back and then select features to install. To exit SQL Server Setup, click Cancel.
Tried again, making sure I wasn't doing something wrong. Same thing. Reboot. Tried again. Same result.
Then a Channel9 thread provided the key. A big THANK YOU to "drinian" (no bio available) who wrote, "Although the original install didn't actually install any of the tools, it did create a "tools" directory. I renamed this directory and then went to try and install the tools and it worked. Evidently the SQL setup was just looking to see if this directory existed."
So rather than uninstalling BOTH Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 and starting from scratch (another solution posed on the thread), I renamed both c:\..SQL Server\80\Tools, c:\..SQL Server\90\Tools, rebooted, and ran the SQL Tools setup again. That did it.
I know this sounds cold, but I'm thinking that if you're going to take five years to release an upgrade between SQL 2000 and SQL 2005, maybe someone could have picked this up before final blast-off. Or maybe someone did and the conversation went something like, "Um, Mr. Chuck, I was thinking. If someone has Visual Studio 2005 installed with SQL Express, which is the default install setting with VS2005 you know, our client tools installation is going to heave." "Ech, Roy, you worry too much! I mean, come on, what are the chances of that happening? How many people are going to load SQL Server 2005 AND Visual Studio 2005?"