Manual Installation Instructions for Express Editions

This page provides instructions for manually installing an Express Edition.

Installation Options

• The recommended option for installing Express Editions is to use the bootstrapper installer that is available via the "Download Now" link on each Express Edition page.
• If the bootstrapper installer fails to install on your computer because of networking problems, or if you want to download a full copy of an Express Edition to burn on CD, then please follow the manual installation instructions listed below.
• After following the manual installation instructions, please be sure to register your copy of Express. You'll get a lot of free stuff such as royalty-free images from Corbis, icons from IconBuffet, and e-books from Microsoft Press. Learn more about registration benefits.

File Packaging and Download Paths

Each Express Edition is packaged in its entirety, including all optional components, as an image (img or iso) file. Below are links to the individual image files for each Express Edition.

Manual Installation Options

• Manually Installing an Express Edition on a local machine
• Burning a Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition to a CD
• Installing an Express Edition from CD

Manually Installing an Express Edition on a local machine

Below are the steps required to manually install an Express Edition:

Note: The steps below use the img file as an example

• Before you get started, make sure to uninstall all pre-release (beta) Express software from your computer.
  You must uninstall all Visual Studio 2005 and Express betas before installing a final release of any Visual Studio 2005 Edition, including an Express Edition. You must also uninstall the beta version of the .NET Framework 2.0 before installing any Express Edition final release.
• Download the Express Edition Image (img) file using the hyperlinks provided in the File Packaging and Download Paths section.
• To install the image directly from your hard drive you will need to install 3rd party software that is capable of understanding *.img file extensions. Popular software programs like Roxio’s Easy Media Creator include a Disk Image Loader application that enables you to mount disc image files in a virtual drive as if they were physical discs in a physical drive. For the example below, we will use Smart-Projects.net IsoBuster 1.8.
• Be sure to set the tool to handle long file names. The default setting for many third party tools does not handle long file names. Some tools extract using the 8.3 file convention. Visual Studio 2005 setup requires the files to be in their long filename format or else setup will fail. This feature can usually be found in the Advanced settings. If you can not find the setting, please refer to the ISO extraction tool help documentation or contact the software vendor for assistance.
• In the IsoBuster setup, make sure to select the “(*.IMG) Image files” file extensions to associate IsoBuster with img file extensions.
  
  IsoBuster setup options for associating file extensions.
• After installing IsoBuster, you will notice that files with a .img extension are now associated to open with IsoBuster as shown below:
  
  Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Image file.
• Double click on the img file to start IsoBuster. You should see something similar to the screenshot below with a list of files contained inside the img file in the right hand pane.
  
  List of files in the Visual Web Developer .img image.
• Select all the files in the right hand side by clicking CTRL+A:
  
  Select all files in the Visual Web Developer .img image.
• Right click on the selected files and you will see a context menu to extract the selected objects. Click the “Extract Objects” option in the context menu.
  
  Context menu for extracting files.
• Next, select the folder to extract the contents of the image file as shown below and click OK.
  
  Browse for Folder dialog.
• This will start the extraction process of the image files as shown below. Extracting the contents from the image file typically takes five minutes.
  
  Image extraction progress dialog.
• After the extraction process is complete, navigate to the directory you chose to extract the files in the previous step and click the setup.exe file to begin the Express Edition installer.
  
  Setup icon to start Express installation.
• If you encounter issues installing a Visual Studio Express Edition, please visit the Express Forums for more help.

Burning a Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition to a CD

Below are the steps required to burn an Express Edition to a CD.

• Before you get started, make sure to uninstall all Express beta software from your computer.
  You must uninstall all Visual Studio 2005 and Express betas before installing a final release of any Visual Studio 2005 Edition, including an Express Edition. You must also uninstall the beta version of the .NET Framework 2.0 before installing any Express Edition final release.
• Download the Express Edition Image (img or iso) file using the hyperlinks provided in the File Packaging and Download Paths section above.
• To burn the image directly to a CD, you will need to install 3rd party software that is capable of understanding and burning image (img or iso) files. Most popular CD burning software include support for burning images, as do popular CD burning software such as Nero 6 Ultra Edition and Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.5.
• Follow the vendor-specific instructions to burn the image onto a CD.

Installing an Express Edition from CD

• After following the CD burning process above, you are ready to install the Express Edition on another computer.
  Important: Before getting started, you will need to perform a series of preparation steps on your machine if you ever installed a pre-release of Visual Studio 2005 (such as Beta 2) on your machine. Please follow these important instructions prior to installation.
• Now simply insert the CD created above into the computer to which you plan to install and click the setup.exe file to begin the installer.
  

If you encounter issues installing the Express Editions, please visit the Express Forums and report your issue for more assistance.