Is it important that Visual Studio 2008 thinks it's the wrong edition?

Question

I installed Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition a month or so ago after a reformat (on Vista64, if that matters). I got it for free from one of those "Heroes Happen Here" launch events.

I then installed SQL Server 2008 Express Edition a week or so ago (we're supposed to be getting that for free in the mail but I gave up - a little too early apparently).

Before I installed SQL Server 2008 Express, when I would start up Visual Studio 2008 the splash screen would read "Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition". Now it says "Visual Studio 2008 Shell".

I figure that for whatever reason the VS2008 skeleton that ships with SQL2008 Express has stepped on the VS2008 skeleton I had there already. I know that if you install SQL2005 on a machine without VS2005, you get a "shell" version of VS2005 with no languages installed (no C#, VB.NET, etc.)

I figure this is no big deal since at worst some registry setting somewhere is wrong and the splash screen is just confused. But am I right? Or is this something that will bite me later when VS2008 for some reason denies me some feature?

Answer 1

To be honest, I wouldn't tempt it. This is sort of like a knock in the engine, but the car drives fine. Then one day you get stranded on the side of the road (or maybe not.) I would suggest an uninstall and a reinstall to be safe. I've had a similar run in with Visual Studio 2008 and that's exactly what I ended up doing.

Answer 2

I'd leave it alone. However, if the engine in my car knocks, I'm getting it rebuilt NOW while the fix is minor, rather than waiting for the catastrophic failure (voice of experience here). :-)

Answer 3

My experience with this on a couple machines is that there is nothing to be concerned about. If you look at the about screen within Visual Studio it should be telling you all the correct information. If your start it from the run command using "devenv /splash" you will likely see the correct splash information displayed too. If you want to get the correct splash screen to show everytime, edit your Visual Studio 2008 shortcut and clear the value from the Start In directory.