This guide is intended to serve as a collection of links to articles, tools, tips and tricks that explain how to deploy products in the Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 family.  I will add links to this article as I write or find new content that addresses additional deployment scenarios.

Deploying Visual Studio 2005

• Creating an administrative install point for Visual Studio 2005
• Instructions for chaining installation of Visual Studio 2005 and MSDN
• How to perform a silent install of Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer
• How to suppress reboots during Visual Studio 2005 unattended installation
• How to fix Visual Studio 2005 unattended installs on Windows Vista
• How to determine whether a VS 2005 product is installed on a computer
• How to silently install MSDN to a non-default location
• How to perform an unattended install of Visual Studio 2005 from a DVD-ROM drive
• How to perform an unattended uninstall of Visual Studio 2005
• How to perform a silent or unattended install of Visio for Enterprise Architects
• How to perform a silent install of the Visual C++ 8.0 runtime (vcredist) files

Deploying Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions

• How to create a combined network install point for all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions
• How to silently install Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions
• Creating a network install point for Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions
• How to perform a command line install of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

Deploying the .NET Framework 2.0

• Available installation modes for the .NET Framework 2.0
• How to deploy the .NET Framework 2.0 using Group Policy
• How to deploy the .NET Framework 2.0 by using the MSI directly
• How to perform an unattended install of the .NET Framework 2.0 redistributable and SDK
• How to perform an unattended uninstall of the .NET Framework
• Sample code to detect .NET Framework install state and service pack level
• Available command line switches for .NET Framework 2.0 setup
• List of possible return codes from .NET Framework 2.0 setup
• How to perform a customized command line install for the .NET Framework SDK 2.0
• Information about deploying .NET Framework 2.0 language packs
• Pre-installation checks performed by .NET Framework 2.0 setup
• How to detect old beta versions when deploying the .NET Framework 2.0
• How to manage reboots when deploying the .NET Framework
• Checking for the .NET Framework at application runtime, not just at setup time

Official product readme files

• .NET Framework SDK 2.0 readme
• Visual Studio 2005 readme
• Visual Studio 2005 enterprise network deployment readme

Additional reference documentation

• Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 Troubleshooting Guide
• How to detect if patches are installed in Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0