I just went through the very lengthy process of moving from MSSQLCE beta to MSSQLCE release. The good news is that after I was done, all of my code still worked, so at least I have that going for me.
The biggest time sink for me was uninstalling applications. Uninstalling the patch from VS2005 Pro was not all that straight-forward. First, I had to re-download and burn the ISO image since I couldn't find my original DVD. I then noticed that I had another entry in my Add/Remove Programs called "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Permier Partner Edition - ENU" that had the VS.NET SP1 Beta applied to it. I had no idea how this program got installed, and that took quite a bit of spelunking to figure out. I came across a blog entry from Heath Stewart that explained how to look into the patch database to figure out which MS patches were applied to which products. After installing that, it needed a Windows Installer Patch (msp) file, but I couldn't find that. I ended up searching my system, and got the VS.NET msp file and opened it in Heath's utility. From there, I got the GUID of the Premier Partner Edition, and searched my registry. In the end, it turned out to be MSSQL 2005 Developer Edition that installed that program. I finally located that DVD, pointed the uninstaller to the right msi file, and I was able to uninstall the patch. However, after completing all of this, I couldn't install the MSSQL Server 2005 Compact Edition Tools for VS 2005 SP1. I received the same error as I did last time (see the above link for details), but I couldn't solve it by doing a Repair on VS.NET, and I couldn't dig anything up in Filemon or Regmon to find out why it was failing so I ended up completely uninstalling and reinstalling VS.NET. Not exactly very user-friendly.
Installing the release of MSSQLCE is very similar to the post I made earlier on how to install MSSQLCE. The difference is the links to the new files, which can be found here: