Xperimentality

There seems to be some folks who are still having problems installing the Windows Phone 7 Beta Tools if they had a previous version installed.  One of the tricks is to make sure it is done in the right order so that any and all dependencies are addressed.  So while this order may differ for you, I am hoping that sharing my experience will help others.

1. I started, as many did, by simply going through Control Panel (CP) and selecting to uninstall the Windows Phone 7 Developer Toolkit.  Well, I didn’t have any more luck than most.  The uninstaller seemed to be trying to install instead of uninstall.
2. I then headed to my Program Files folder and found the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP – ENU folder.  Mine was located at “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone  CTP – ENU”.  In this folder, I right-clicked the vs_setup.msi and selected uninstall from the context menu.
3. Next I uninstalled “Windows Phone 7 tools addin for Visual Studio 2010” via the CP.
4. Then I uninstalled “Visual Studio 2010 Express Prerequisites x64-ENU” via the CP.
5. Next on the list was to uninstall “XNA Game Studio 4.0 Windows Phone Extensions” via the CP.
6. After that, I uninstalled “XNA Game Studio 4.0” via the CP.
7. At this point I did my first reboot in the process.  After reboot, “Windows Phone Developer Toolkit” no longer showed up in the CP program list.
8. I uninstalled “Windows Phone Developer Resources” via the CP.
9. Then I uninstalled “Windows Phone Emulator x64 – ENU” from the CP.  This is a step many forget if they can get everything else uninstalled.  You have to uninstall the emulator or the new tools will try to use the existing emulator.
10. Now, I uninstalled “Expression Blend 4 Add-in Preview 2 for Windows Phone” via the CP.  Keep in mind that you may not have all of these options depending on what you installed in the first place.
11. I then uninstalled “Expression Blend SDK Preview 2 for Windows Phone” also via the CP.
12. I rebooted here for the second time.
13. After this reboot, I noticed that there were still some remnants of the XNA Studio and extensions.  So I ran the XNA Cleanup Tool.  The download for the tool and the list products it removes can be found at Aaron Stebner’s blog.  I ran it twice.  The first time I specified “Windows Phone Developer Tools” as the product.  The next time I specified “XNA Game Studio 4.0” as the product.  Both runs exited with 0.
14. After running the cleanup tool I figured I might need to reboot for good measure so my third reboot.
15. After this reboot, I installed the Beta tools with no problems.

I hope this helps anyone else who may still be having problems getting the Beta tools installed.