Uninstalling Previous Versions
Many of you have been good citizens and have been busy beta-testing numerous Microsoft pre-release products over the last few months. We've received a lot of inquiries about how to uninstall previous versions and ensure your machine is clean and ready for the RTM products now that they are available. Here are some pointers that should assist with this.
Visual Studio 2005
The "Uninstalling Previous Versions of Visual Studio 2005" article explains how to manually remove previous iterations of VS and the related components. There is also a tool located on this site which automates these steps for you.
I would also ensure that no .NET Framework v2 folders exist on the computer after uninstall. Check the %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\ directory to verify this. I have seen v2.0.50215 dangle around after uninstall for no apparent reason and would recommend deleting manually this before running the RTM installation, which should drop a v2.0.50727 folder in this directory. v1.0.x and v1.1.x folders are fine to remain on the machine.
SQL Server 2005
Aaron Stebner has a blog entry with information on how to remove beta versions of SQL Server 2005.
