Question: I have a SSD as my primary (C:) drive, mainly used for quickly loading games. 

It's pretty small (~30 GB) so I want to keep things that don't really need a speed boost off of it. I attempted installing the Visual Studio 2010 Express beta last night, and it claimed to require 2.1 GB of space so I changed the install directory to a secondary, non-SSD drive.

After this, the installer said that it would use 1.8 GB on C: and ~200 MB on the secondary drive. 

While this token gesture of moving 1/10 of the app to the place I told it to is cute, I really want to install everything I can to the secondary drive. 

**Is there any way to install all of Visual Studio 2010 Express to a drive besides C:?**

Answer: 
No, much of what VS installs (regardless of version) goes into subdirectories in your Windows folder: things such as the .NET frameworks, shared files, etc. So if you installed Windows to the C: drive, VS has to install much of it's core there as well.
Kind of.

The setup DVD contains a file Setup\baseline.dat. This is a large text file which stores information on where to install large chunks of the software.

You need to edit the text file and change the lines which say

> 
> DefaultPath=[ProgramFilesFolder]\VC\
> 
> 
> ...
> 
> 
> DefaultPath=[ProgramFilesFolder]\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0
> 
> 
> ...
> 
> 
> DefaultPath=[ProgramFilesFolder]\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE
> 
> 
> 

to the following

> 
> DefaultPath=D:\Applications\VS2010\VC\
> 
> 
> ...
> 
> 
> DefaultPath=D:\Applications\VS2010\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0
> 
> 
> ...
> 
> 
> DefaultPath=D:\Applications\VS2010\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE
> 
> 
> 

That will get most of the stuff off C.

This also works with VisualStudio 2005/2008 and the Express Editions. I've been using this trick for years and never encountered a problem.

n.B: Some parts of the installer also use locations such as *DefaultPath=[WindowsFolder]\assembly*. You can edit these in the same way to free up even more space, but I can't guarantee this won't break things. Obviously if you're installing from a DVD/iso you need to copy the entire contents of the DVD to a folder before editing baseline.dat, otherwise it will be read-only.