I'm hoping this may save someone some pain. I had trouble getting the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit installed in the past. My first adventure was several months ago at my former employer. I nearly pulled my hair out trying to figure out why I couldn't get GAX/GAT installed for VS2005. After all, it worked on my home machine, and I had full access rights on my machine at work as well. At some point, I stumbled across a blog post where somebody mentioned having similar issues in an environment where his employer ran McAfee tools, namely the McAfee Host Intrusion application. So, I contacted a network administrator and asked him to turn it off on my machine so I could try installing GAX/GAT, which my company was planning on utilizing in an upcoming project. Lo and behold, the installation worked. Now I had installed numerous amounts of open source applications and other 3rd party tools on my machine, and I never had an issue with the McAfee Host Intrusion Process before. Why with GAX/GAT I don't know.
Now, leap ahead several months. I am now working at home on a Vista development machine. I've been using VS2008 for my development, so I was eager to try out the first CTP available for the GAX/GAT. No dice. The first version I had tried using was, I believe, meant for VS2008 Beta 2. So, I proceeded to uninstall the GAX/GAT through Add/Remove Programs and just wait for the VS2008-compatible version to be released. Well, my VS2008 started throwing errors on startup, so I went back to researching what was going on. I found this post on CodePlex to patch things up, and I was back to normal.
Well, recently, Patterns & Practices released the February 2008 version of GAX/GAT which is compatible with VS2008. Naturally, I was eager to see if I could get it installed successfully this time. I began with the GAX and had no issues. The newest version is supposed to be more friendly as it does not explicitly require you to uninstall any previously-installed versions first. Next, I proceeded to try installing the GAT for VS2005 (I do run VS2005 and VS2008 side by side at the moment). So far, so good. Next, I tried the GAT installation for VS2008, thinking "I've almost got it!". Oops...my excitement was short-lived. I was confronted with the dreaded message saying that it was unable to install because a previous version of the GAT was already installed. Okay...I thought I had removed everything. I did some research...most of it outdated, but similar to my problem...it just wasn't specific to the latest version. Apparently installation issues have been quite common with the GAX/GAT. None of the solutions I found initially did me any good. I had already uninstalled everything using the Add/Remove Programs applet in the Control Panel. I wanted to remove everything manually, so I found some articles/blogs saying to look for the RecipeFramework.xml file and remove unwanted guidance package entries, as well as finding the document detailing how to remove items manually. No dice...all of those files were gone. Now what? I finally ran the install and generated a log file. Not much help there beyond confirming what my problem was...it won't install because it thinks a previous version is installed. Finally, I stumbled upon this post on MSDN forums. About halfway down the page, you'll find a section detailing how to remove packages from the registry entries under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0. Since my VS2005 and VS2008 were both hosed (even though the first GAT install for VS2005 looked like it worked), I followed along with the forum post and cleaned out my registry, removing the items as suggested. Voilà! It worked for VS2005. I ran the GAT installation again, and I was in business. Now, modify the registry key for \VisualStudio\9.0 and do the same thing. Crossing my fingers I tried again...success! I was able run the VS2008 GAT installation and everything worked out. Wow! What a pain. I had installed the Web Service Software Factory Modeling Edition at one point, and apparently a lot of entries were still in the registry even though I had tried removing everything awhile ago. Let's hope I'm all set now for future upgrades too. Needless to say, using the GAX/GAT up to this point hasn't been a very user-friendly experience, and it has turned me off from using the Guidance Packages to their full potential. Thus, far, I'm happily able to use the Web Service Software Factory Modeling edition and GAX/GAT are working with no issues. Now, I'm looking forward to the other guidance packages that imagine will soon be forthcoming with the recent GAX/GAT upgrades.