Today is going to be this year's big day.

The hero in me stays home and tries to upgrade one of our test servers with Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition with all (!) updates to Window Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.

It seems to be a thought-out, reliable process:

http://blogs.msdn.com/neilhut/archive/2008/02/19/application-considerations-when-upgrading-to-windows-server-2008.aspx

So, I wasn't really prepared for

Ah, no problem. Just go to Add/Remove Programs and try to find "Windows PowerShell" ...

If it wasn't for the icon, I wouldn't have found it.

Careful as I am, I'm reading the Powershell Knowledge Base Article again and there it says:

If you install Windows PowerShell 1.0 on Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, and then you upgrade to Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2, you cannot uninstall Windows PowerShell 1.0.

So, what am I supposed to do now? Hit "Remove" despite the dire warnings in the article? Try the upgrade on a then "unsupported" configuration? (Well, test servers with MSDN subscription software are somewhat unsupported to begin with.)

Or wipe the server clean and give up on upgrading anyway?

U-turn, Lili.

If you feel tempted to do some uninstallation on your machine, including SQL Server 2005 Express w/ Advanced Services and the toolkit, including Management Studio and Business Intelligence Studio, then strangely in Visual Studio, Code Analysis and other components and add-ins may behave erratically afterwards.

SYMPTOMS

The Code Analysis tab may be missing from the Project Properties page and the "Suppress Message(s)" menu item may be disabled no matter what you do. Also, if you have "CopySource As Html" installed it may be missing, too.

RESOLUTION

Install MSXML 6 and its latest security updates.

DO use Code Analysis (aka FxCop). It's not the best code analysis you can have, but, as always, better than no code analysis at all.

DO NOT suppress any code analysis error on sight. You may see them code lines again when you debug an error reported from a customer.

http://www.agilent.com/about/newsroom/presrel/2008/21feb-ca08013.html

Another dot on my resume.

I'm quite anxious to see customer's reactions. What about the overall architecture, what about rough edges, if any?

Software for niche markets is never without trouble, both for developers and customers. Let's hope they let us take a second breath.