I recently tried to install SQL Server 2008 Express Edition, only to receive a nice error message:

I found this rather strange, as I already have VS2008 SP1 installed:

I found a few posts where other people were having the same problem, but most fixes usually involved uninstalling Visual Studio first and I really didn’t want to go through this. Other workarounds suggested it would work if you unticked SSMS, but this wasn’t something I wanted either!

Luckily, there is a command argument that allows you to skip certain rules, so I ran the following command from a command prompt and successfully bypassed the rule! 😀

setup.exe /ACTION=install /SkipRules=VSShellInstalledRule

Now, I’m not sure if this should of worked, or why it did, but from what I can tell everything is working as it should and I can use both VS and SSMS without any problems.

I hope this helps someone as this is quite a time consuming task especially when you have to repeat it due to errors!