LightSwitch Beta 2 is out. That’s how all this started. All I wanted was to install it on my MBP’s Win7 Parallels VM. But as I’m finding with running a Win7 VM on a MBP, nothing is as easy as it should be.

First my MBP froze during the SP1 installation. Not my VM crashing, the entire machine freezing…no mouse, nothing. Had to do a hard reset. BLECH.

Then we’re back and I try to re-install SP1 (since the first try obviously failed). I get met with a dialog asking me where silverlight_sdk.msi was. It was *nowhere*! So I hit the net and download it from Microsoft’s site. Unfortunately, it only downloads an exe and not the individual files which would include the msi. Here’s what I did:

- Download the tools for Silverlight 4 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=b3deb194-ca86-4fb6-a716-b67c2604a139&displaylang=en)

- Run it, but don’t hit the install or next button when the dialog comes up

- Look in your file structure for a folder with a weird name…bunch of numbers and letters. This is a temp folder that the exe creates and dumps all the necessary setup files into, and clears away after its done.

- Inside this folder you’ll find the silverlight_sdk.msi (hooray!). Just copy it to a different location on the C drive. You can then cancel installation.

Ok, so that takes care of that…but then running the SP1 installer I get hit with *another* dialog asking for the WCF RIA Services SP1 msi. Now it looks like this MSI is part of the Silverlight Tools package because you’ll see the MSI, but the VS.NET 2010 SP1 installer will thumb its nose at this unworthy msi…for whatever reason. So instead, go here:

http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/riaservices/

…and click on the “Install WCF Ria Services Sp1…” option. This downloads the msi, which you should save to your C drive and direct the VS.NET 2010 SP1 installer to.

Then, if you’ve done all that, been good all year, and not made any little children cry, you *might* just be able to install VS.NET 2010 SP1 on your Parallels VM.

If you were playing that “Take a shot every time he writes VS.NET 2010 Sp1” drinking game, then you’re drunk…which is a better place to be than where I am right now: watching the installation progress bar slowly creep to completion, hoping there’s no more surprises in store.

D