The Day Visual Studio Went Crazy

I said it before, the Visual Studio installer gets me mad. All is fine until you want to install the Service Pack. After that you cannot install additional components until you uninstall the SP. Because of that, you should make sure you installed the entire Visual Studio package before installing SP1. So I did, but it proved not enough. Here is the story of what happened today.

1. I installed Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate on my machine (a couple of weeks ago).
2. I installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1. So far all was good, I was able to use it with no problems.
3. But then I decided to install the Windows Phone developer tools, following the steps described on this page. After that, when I started Visual Studio 2010 I got this message that SP1 was applied only partially and in order to start the application it must be applied to all components (which was weird because I did that before a couple of times and everything was fine).
4. I have installed the SP1 again. Then, when I started VS2010 it worked.
5. However, I wanted to install the Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling SDK to be able to automatically build my text templates when building the solutions, as described here. This SDK needed Visual Studio 2010 SDK installed on the machine. But when I ran the installer for the SDK I got the following error:

   

   Obviously the error message was non-sense, not only I had VS2010 installed, but it had all the components, and the service pack was applied. Knowing the problems with the service pack, I immediately figured it was the reason.

6. I have uninstalled the Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Of course, while it was uninstalling it crashed, so I had to start it again.

   

7. I started the Visual Studio 2010 installer just to make sure I had all the components installed. However, I ran into this error:

   

   After several failed attempts I decided to restart Windows. That did the trick and the installer started correctly and I could make sure all the components were there.

8. I installed Visual Studio 2010 SDK successfully.
9. I installed Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling SDK successfully.
10. I installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1 successfully.

Then, three hours later, I could start working with Visual Studio 2010 again. Text templates are automatically built, and the Windows Phone tools are working correctly.

Puff!