I installed the 90 day trial of VS2008 at work.  My trial period is almost up, so I figured I'd go ahead and Upgrade to the purchased product.  I was assured when I downloaded the trial that I would simply have to enter the key (not do a reinstall) when my trial was up.

Well, I hit Upgrade.  I am not sure what is wrong with the Microsoft servers, but Upgrade sends me to a Content Not Found page on msdn.mcirosoft.com.

Strike one.

I won't give up that easily.  The product is great even if the sales site needs work.  So I decided to try to buy it another way.  I called support.  They were very helpful, but all of their answers pointed me in directions that got physical media and not a key.  Keep in mind, my trial is running out.  I do have 3 days left, so I didn't wait until the last second, but what if I did?  Would I be forced to stop working until my physical media was shipped to me?

Strike two.

I am searching the site. 

Here is a product page for Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition.  I see a Trial Download button.  Why not a Buy Now button? 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/products/bb894671.aspx

I clicked Download.  Here I have a paragraph that looks helpful:

Upgrading from Trial Editions

When you are ready to upgrade from an installed trial edition of Visual Studio or Team Foundation Server (or the Workgroup Edition of Team Foundation Server), you don't have to completely uninstall and reinstall those products. For more information, see How to: Upgrade from Visual Studio Trial Edition (a Visual Studio 2005 topic, but still accurate).

Clicking that link gives me another potentially helpful page (although I see it is geared toward 2005, not 2008):  http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/.

Content not found.

Sigh.