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?
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.