First off, if you’re installing Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 and want some Silverlight love, don’t uncheck Visual Web Developer from the installer! If you do, the Silverlight Tools for VS beta 2 installer will tell you that VS 2008 isn’t installed. You may proceed to bang your head on the desk for several hours, reinstall a few times, and even contact the Silverlight team to save your sorry ass (thanks guys! 
). All will be in vain without that checkbox, so leave it alone!
Also, if you’re already using Orcas beta 1, do not under any circumstances delete your installation source before uninstalling it (a particularly tempting proposition if you installed through Virtual Clonedrive or Daemon Tools, rather than burn a disk like a normal person).
Hopefully these tips will save you some distress 
.
Chris Cavanagh's Blog 
I have had the worst luck with beta2 and still don’t have it successfully installed. I’ve downloaded it several times and each time the ISO is corrupt. I’ve tried mounting it as a virtual drive and running it, and eventually the setup just stalls.
I’ve also tried burning it to a CD, same problem. Each time I burn it the validation indicates there was an error in the burning.
I’m gonna try again this weekend.
Matt – That really sucks 😦 Hope you have more luck getting it downloaded next time. Heck, I’ll burn it myself and mail it you if it doesn’t work out 🙂
Same with me.
– I have Vista and I had Beta 1 installed. Worked like a charm (started building an commercial app on it)
– Installed Beta 2 fine, then got the ASP.NET toolbox error.
– Tried re-installing (this was before the fix was there)…since then I have not been able to install it…it craps out on the .NET 2.0 sp1.
I worked with Microsoft…they want like 20 log files and I just got tired and said screw this. I ended up installing Virtual PC Image. It works well and no problems.
I tested MY method of installation for my free copy of VS2005 TS. I got an error installing VSTS because setup can’t eventually catch up whether MSXML is installed on my system, but it did! In some reason i have to have keeping installed MSXML4 within MSXML4 SDK in my computer, so i edited setup.sdb, and some others files, just to be sure that installation system WILL not NEITHER chech for MSXML NOR install it. And what do you think happens? It just works! It installs everything it finds in dependencies files, so now i have perfectly working VSTS2005 without any troubles. Suppose you probably need to use this method to have VSTS 2008 Beta2 installed. Currently I’m downloading a VSTS2008 Beta2 ISO and will post here additional instructions step by step if i find some installation issues for that image.
Regards, Artur Mustafin
P.S.
Russian hackers are the best!
P.P.S.
Sorry for my poor English, I learned it from MSDN web site 😉
Bart, Artur – Hope you still think being on the bleeding edge is worth the pain! 🙂 (I do).
The private developer beta and the RTM fixed both issues 🙂 Definitetly something on the MS end. I am not sure why MS decided to make sp1 for .net 2 and 3 non-distributable (as of now anyway).
Bart – Yay! 🙂 I’ve been pretty happy with VS2008 so far; no particular complaints 🙂 Even if I had some, LINQ (and its intellisense) is so cool I’d probably overlook / ignore them anyway 😉
Visual Studio 2008 SP1
iso image ?
I’ve also tried burning it to a CD, same problem.
Burn CD not enought space.
DVD format error.
Fernando – You can download SP1 from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBEE1648-7106-44A7-9649-6D9F6D58056E&displaylang=en. There’s also a link for just .NET 3.5 SP1 if you want. You might have more luck with that installer than using the ISO.
Another option is use something like 7-Zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) to extract the ISO contents to a folder and install from there 🙂