Problems with LINQ Preview May 2006 installation and its non trivial solution

After loooong time, I decided to bring my weblog back to life. I will try to mantain it more often. Just to begin, I changed the engine with a Wordpress and some plugins that allows me to write posts using wiki syntax. Now I will can share my adventures with new technologies I'm investigating.

I started with C# 3.0 and its wonderful feature LINQ and its friends. I've downloaded the may 2006 preview from Microsoft LINQ site.

After reading some docs and test the examples I wanted to start coding. That's when I found the suposed (minimal) integration with Visual Studio was not there. Nothing... no templates, no compiler, no syntax highlighting. Finally I found the solution in the LINQ forums. The problem seems to be that I don't have VB installed! :S

Installing the MSI with this 'little' trick instead of running it directly, fixes the problem without forcing you to install VB:

  msiexec.exe /i "LINQ Preview (May 2006).msi"

  VCSPROJECTTEMPLATESDIR.C7A0C9D96EB648548BD084A2A4C688EB="C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Common7IDEProjectTemplatesCSharpLINQ Preview"

  VCSPKGDIR.C7A0C9D96EB648548BD084A2A4C688EB="C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8VC#VCSPackages"

  VCSIDEDIR.C7A0C9D96EB648548BD084A2A4C688EB="C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Common7IDE"

  DEBUGVISUALIZERDIR.C7A0C9D96EB648548BD084A2A4C688EB="C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Common7PackagesDebuggerVisualizers"

  CSWEBPROJECTTEMPLATESDIR.4AE13B6F621C49B9995EB64016EC2E60="C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Common7IDEProjectTemplatesWebCSharp1033"

  CSITEMTEMPLATEDIR.92D1EB66EA714CFE9C88A25F2388CD0F="C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Common7IDEItemTemplatesCSharp1033"

  DEVENV="C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Common7IDEDevenv.exe" DEVENVPATH="C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8Common7IDE"

Hopefuly, this will not be needed in the next versions :P