Hello ! hooray ! I have VS.Whidbey and VS.2003 running side by side.

Actually installing Whidbey was a snap. Quick, to VS.net standards and no reboot required. The .net framework presents itself as version 1.2 of the framework. It was announced as version 2.0 of the framework, so it makes very good sense to publish the first betalpha as 1.2. So we can have side by side execution of the subsequent beta versions 1.3, 1.4 and so on. I guess the final release will bear the 2.0 label. After installing Whidbey I had to run the 1.1 version of aspnet_regiis to make clear that the existing apps have to keep running under 1.1. A full story on that is found here on the asp.net site.

After installing WhidBey it would not run any webapps. All of them led to a compilation error : Compiler Error Message: CS1668: Invalid search path 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET\FrameworkSDK\Lib\' -- 'The system cannot find the path specified. '. This was pretty weird as Whidbey is refering to a no longer existing directory which was part of Vs.net 2002. It took me some time to find out why on earth Whideby was trying to look there. Finally I found in the registry un HKEY_Current_User an environment and an include value which looked like this

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Whidbey\SDK\v1.2\Lib\;
d:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\Lib\;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET\FrameworkSDK\Lib\

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Whidbey\SDK\v1.2\include\;
d:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\SDK\v1.1\include\;
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET\FrameworkSDK\include\

That is the history of Vs.net on my machine. Uninstalling 2002 had not cleaned up its settings. 2003 apparantly didn't care about this but Whidbey tripped over it. After deleting the 2002 pieces, also from the control sets, and rebooting I had Whidbey and 2003 running side by side in perfect harmony. And my localhost is serving 1.1 and 1.2 pages at the same time.

Let the show begin !