Moving from Visual Studio 2010 RC to RTM

I’ve just been doing a bit of housekeeping before moving to VS2010 RTM, in particular removing VS2010 RC and the Phone tools. I wanted to get things as clean as possible before installing RTM. It surprised me a little was that the RTM readme didn’t tell me how to remove the RC, you need get hold of the RC readme. So just in case you’re searching for this, I recommend taking a look at:

• The Visual Studio 2010 RC readme file
• The Visual Studio 2010 RTM readme file
• Just for completeness, here are the older readmes too
  • Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 readme file
  • Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 readme file

From the RC readme, here are the steps to remove Visual Studio 2010 RC where an earlier version of Visual Studio is not installed (or you don’t care that you might remove items shared or installed by the earlier version, as in my case).

1. Open "Programs and Features" in Control Panel (also known as  Add-Remove Programs):
2. Uninstall all instances of Visual Studio 2010 products (for example, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate).
3. Optionally, uninstall the following supporting products that may have been installed with Visual Studio 2010.  NOTE: These components may also be used by other product suites on your computer.
   1. Web Deployment Tool
   2. Silverlight 3 SDK
   3. Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2
   4. SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2
   5. SQL Server 2008
   6. SQL Server 2008 Native Client
   7. SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Objects
   8. SQL Server System CLR Types
4. Uninstall other remaining supporting products, in the specified order.  (Ignore items that are not present on your computer.)
   1. The .NET Framework version 4 Language Pack
   2. The .NET Framework version 4 Extended (reboot, if prompted) 
   3. The .NET Framework version 4 Client (reboot, if prompted)

I’d recommend reading the readme(s) thoroughly rather than just relying on the above but it’s a convenient checklist.