The Visual Studio RC has shown some install issues in some cases, particularly for those who upgrades from VS 11 Beta.  I have listed the fixes known now below, and will update if there are more issues.  Note that a repair will not fix the issue, and a Windows restore and subsequent reinstall may not fix it either.  The system seems to remember too much. That was the case for me, at least.  The fixes below however, cures these issues.

1. The Team Explorer Build node doesn’t work

You get an error saying System.TypeLoadException like this:

To solve this do as follows:

1. Open a command prompt as administrator

2. Go to your program files directory for VS 2012 and down to  the extension folder like:   C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer

3. Run “gacutil –if Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Controls.dll

2. The SQL Editor gives loading error

When you start up VS 2012 RC you get a loading error message.  The same happens if you try to go from the menu to  SQL/Transact-SQL Editor/New Query. 

To solve this do as follows:

1. Open Control Panel/Programs and Features

2. Locate the “Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Data-Tier App Framework

    (Note , you might find up to 4 such instances)

The ones with version numbers ending in 55 is from the SQL 2012 RC, the ones ending in 60 is from the SQL 2012 RTM.  There are two of each, one for x32 and one for x64.  Which is which no one knows.

3. Right click each of them, and select Repair.

(It would be nice if someone with this issue tries only the latest RTM ones, and see if that clears the error, and comment back to this post. I am out of non-functioning VS’s )

3.  Errors referring to some extension

You get errors referring to some extension that can’t be loaded, or can’t be found.  Check the activity log (see below), and verify there.  If you see yellow collision warnings there, the fix here should solve those too.

To solve these:   

1. Open a Visual Studio 2012 command prompt

2.  Run:   devenv /resetsettings

How to check for errors using the log

Do as follows to get to the activity log for Visual studio 2012 RC

1. Open a Visual Studio 2012 command prompt

2. Run:   devenv /log

This starts up Visual Studio. 

3. Go to %appdata%/Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0

4. Double click the file named ActivityLog.xml. 

It will start up in your browser, and be formatted using the xslt in the same directory.

5.  Look for items marked in red. 

Example for Issue 1 :