Is it safe to uninstall visual studio 2005 standard ed. after upgrade to visual studio 2008 pro?

Question

I recently bought Visual Studio 2008 Professional [Upgrade] to upgrade from my current Visual Studio 2005 Standard.

Now that I have installed VS 2008, is it 'safe' to uninstall VS 2005 using the Add/Remove control panel?

I don't see any benefit of running 2005 and 2008 side-by-side. I have upgraded my projects into 2008 and have everything I need.

My concern is that by 'upgrading' there is still reliance from VS 2008 on some of the components that were installed with VS 2005 and that by uninstalling VS 2005 I will inadvertently remove components that are required for VS 2008 to work correctly?

Answer 1

No, there are no components of VS 2005 that the new version needs.

It's safe to uninstall VS 2005 before launching setup of VS 2008 Pro

Answer 2

I doubt that because they are two separate products. The "upgrade" is most likely only an "upgrade" from the legal point of view, physically it's still the same standalone setup.

DISCLAIMER: This is only a speculation and I don't have any real knowledge about this issue.

Answer 3

I'd say that you never know. Technically, all shared DLLs have reference counters associated with them, so from this standpoint it's safe to remove previous version of product.

Answer 4

You may have some glitches as the one described in this post:

http://tozon.info/blog/post/2007/11/29/Visual-Studio-2008-and-Business-Intelligence-Projects.aspx

The problems will mostly depend on what type of development you do. Maybe when you have to work with something different from your usual development tasks you may find that something is broken, that is, some DLL might have been removed when you uninstalled VS 2005. There's always reliance on some old files.

The point is that the VS team tries to make VS versions separate entities but as we know, softwares have bugs and reliances (breaking points).