Jack @ ASP.NET

On machines with a 64-bit OS, uninstall of Office 2007 will break the VS 2008 web designer.  You will find that the VS designer won’t be able to load, and any attempts to switch to Design View will hang the product.  Note that 32-bit machines are not affected and neither are other VS releases.

The root cause of this problem is that Office 2007 and the VS 2008 web designer both share a component, 32-bit MSXML5.  When Office 2007 uninstalls or gets upgraded, MSXML5 is removed yet Visual Studio still needs it.

If you are affected by this issue, there are workarounds where you may not have to completely reinstall Visual Studio.  However, the steps are different depending on how Office 2007 got removed (uninstall vs. upgrade to Office 2010) and also if you have VWD Express or a full product.

Workaround if you manually uninstalled Office 2007 (i.e. Add/Remove Programs) AND have a non-Express version of VS 2008:

1. Go to Add/Remove Programs
2. Uninstall “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component“
3. Reinstall “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component” -
• You will need the VS install media: the product DVD or mount an ISO image
• Go to WCU\WebDesignerCore folder and run WebDesignerCore.exe.
• Setup does not have UI, so please simply wait about 5 minutes or watch msiexec activity in the Task Manager.
• Verify that Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component reappears in Add/Remove Programs.
• WebDesignerCore.exe installs RTM version.
4. If your VS 2008 has been updated to SP1, you have to reinstall SP1 to update the Web Authoring Component you installed in Step 3.

Workaround if you manually uninstalled Office 2007 (i.e. Add/Remove Programs) AND have Visual Web Developer Express 2008:

1. Go to Add/Remove Programs  
2. Uninstall “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component“
3. Reinstall Visual Web Developer Express 2008/SP1
   (SP1 for Express is not a separate install thus the need to reinstall the entire product)

The final release of VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 will have ASP.NET MVC 2 built-in – so you won’t need an additional install in order to use ASP.NET MVC 2 with them.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Features

• New Strongly Typed HTML Helpers
• Enhanced Model Validation support across both server and client
• Auto-Scaffold UI Helpers with Template Customization
• Support for splitting up large applications into “Areas”
• Asynchronous Controllers support that enables long running tasks in parallel
• Support for rendering sub-sections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction
• Lots of new helper functions, utilities, and API enhancements
• Improved Visual Studio tooling support

ASP.NET MVC 2 is the next significant update of ASP.NET MVC. It is a compatible update to ASP.NET MVC 1 – so all the knowledge, skills, code, and extensions you already have with ASP.NET MVC continue to work and apply going forward.

ASP.NET MVC 2 is the next significant update of ASP.NET MVC. It is a compatible update to ASP.NET MVC 1 – so all the knowledge, skills, code, and extensions you already have with ASP.NET MVC continue to work and apply going forward. Like the first release, we are also shipping the source code for ASP.NET MVC 2 under an OSI-compliant open-source license.