Replacing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 with Beta 2

I recently helped someone out with replacing Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 Beta 1 with the newer Beta 2 release. Here are a few things that I had to learn along the way.

I've done enough beta installations to know that having previous versions of the same release will cause endless headaches. I don't even try to install over top of a beta installation first to see if it will work. The Beta 2 release notes for Visual Studio 2010 lead off with a known issue that trying to install Beta 2 without uninstalling Beta 1 first will fail.

Unfortunately, uninstalling Beta 1 wasn't successful as the installer would ask for the setup location for the TFS Object Model and then crash. I found the solution to that in the Beta 2 installation addendum. Before uninstalling the main Visual Studio 2010 program, uninstall Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 Object Model. This ran to completion and stopped the crashing in the Visual Studio uninstaller. It looks like you only need to worry about this component if you had installed Visual Studio Team Suite.

After uninstalling Visual Studio, this left a few Beta 1 components behind. Here's the order that worked for me:

1.
Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Extended Beta 1
2.
Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile Beta 1
3.
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1 Redistributable x64
4.
Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1 Redistributable x86

At that point the system was clean and installing Beta 2 of Visual Studio and .Net 4 worked on the first try.