Installing VS 2010 B2 & .NET 4 B2: What are the consequences to my system and previous installations of VS & .NET 3.5 SP1?

I want to try out the new Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010, but I'm not sure if the installation (or the included .NET Framework 4 Beta 2) is开发者_如何学C self-contained, or if it will somehow impact my system beyond adding an entry for Visual Studio 2010 to my start menu.

The machine I want to install Visual Studio 2010 is my main development machine, so it is critical that no changes are made to Visual Studio Team System 2008 & .NET 3.5 SP1, already on the system.

Can I install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 without breaking my development environment?

Visual Studio 2010 b2 is supposed to be safe to install side-by-side with VS 2008. There is a problem with the Silverlight 3 Toolkit, where you have to reinstall it.

ScottGu blogged about it here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/19/vs-2010-and-net-4-0-beta-2.aspx

They install fine side-by-side with just the SL3 proviso as Rune says, but bear in mind that if you start opening VS2008 solutions in VS2010 it will want to migrate them and you will have problems re-opening the migrated solutions in VS2008.

You can get around this by creating separate solutions for each VS version and using the same projects/code in both, see this SO thread: