How clean is uninstalling the Service Packs from Visual Studio 2005?

Question

This is a total dah question but I hope somebody can help me out.

I have VS2005 SP2, nonetheless, I really need to use VS2005 No-SP to compile the release version of our product. Is it "safe" to uninstall the service packs? What I mean by this is:

What implications should I take into consideration? Will be things left from either Service Pack that might invalidate my requirement? Would it be better to uninstall VS2005 and everything and then reinstalling it? Should I rather format my computer and install VS2005?

Answer 1

Sorry for not directly answering your question, but might I suggest using virtual machines for your 'special' development scenarios?

In our office, people who get new machines, or for whatever reason find themselves doing a clean install are installing Windows 7. As such, they really don't want to pollute their clean 7 installation with our legacy development tools because of the occasional need to update one of our legacy applications.

Instead, they use a Windows XP virtual machine into which they install our legacy development tools. Having these special-situation development VMs saves so much time. (Testing in general is so much easier with VMs, too!)

A nice plus that makes working with these VMs is the "Unity" feature of the latest version of VMWare Workstation (6.5.) If you're not familiar with Unity, watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4PYg9WkSLc It's very handy being able to have your virtualized apps appear to be a part of your host OS.

Answer 2

Since it seems that your actual problem is the dependency on the CRT DLLs, you should look at the _USE_RTM_VERSION macro. There are corresponding macros for ATL and MFC.