Camelot Blog

SOLUTION:
I can go ahead and give you all the technical details to the core as to how and why the silverlight installation fails. Instead I am going to get to the bottom line directly
Silverlight installation fails due to (one of) the following reasons:

1.    Beta .NET packages installed on the system

The beta releases tend to avoid the installation of the silverlight 2. For this reason, make sure to remove all the beta versions of .NET on your machine. This includes even the service pack beta releases if any. However do not remove the Visual Studio or SQL Server !  At this point you can follow the detailed instructions and all will be well! (That is, if you’re lucky; I wasn’t.)

There are simply too many fragile issues and fixes. It is better to wait until all this stuff gets fixed. This would surely save us a lot of headaches and time.

NOTE:
Make sure you “UNINSTALL” Hotfix KB944899 first. Otherwise, you are going to spend a lot of time waiting only to see a failure message at the VERY end of the installation

2.    Setup is unable to find the setup.exe file of the Visual Studio 2005/2008
Once again, this remedy was found by trial and error method. For some reason, silverlight 2 needs to know where to find the setup.exe files. Weird but true !

3.    If none of the above works, download and use Windows Installer CleanUp Utility to uninstall existing Silverlight:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301.

This utility perform clean of Windows Installer DB.

So at the end of the day (or week, or however long it takes to check out and fix any or all of these little glitches) is Silverlight 2 worth all the hassle?  I think so!You can build real business applications with this, and you can put them on your commercial web site.It seems to be remarkably stable. That’s cool.

I am not against anyone experimenting with BETAs, but if I have to jump through hoops just to get one installed and working, then yes, I surely do have a problem !

Goodluck with Silverlight !! Have fun Coding

Krishna
Senior Dotnet Architect

SilverLight