Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

November 2005 - Visual Studio Setup

Windows Installer Cache

November 29, 2005 Nov 29, 2005 11/29/05
Heath Stewart
Windows Installer packages may contain streams identified in the Media table if the Cabinet column value begins with the number sign #, as documented for the Cabinet data type. This cabinet is embedded as a stream within the .msi file and contains files referenced in the File table using their File key column value. When packages are installed...

Blog Customizations, Part 3: OO JavaScript

November 21, 2005 Nov 21, 2005 11/21/05
Heath Stewart
Not satisfied by the search feature provided by Community Server I've again created some helpful JavaScript classes this time using object-oriented JavaScript to define a basic search provider and to subclass that for specialized providers like MSN Search. I defined several private properties and several privileged methods that can access ...

Shell Extensions for .NET Assemblies, Version 1.4.1993

November 17, 2005 Nov 17, 2005 11/17/05
Heath Stewart
Some time back I made modifications to the previous version of my shell extensions for .NET assemblies to display differences in the column handler for both native and managed binaries targeting the x86, IA64, and x64 platform architectures. Now that the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 has released, I've updated my public drops. In a future ...

Waiting for msiexec.exe to Finish

November 15, 2005 Nov 15, 2005 11/15/05
Heath Stewart
Since Windows Installer 1.0 was first released, msiexec.exe has always run in the Windows subsystem. That means that when it is executed from the console or by a batch script control returns to the console or script immediately. If you depend upon the %ERRORLEVEL% variable being set accordingly it won't be. In this scenario I like to use start...

Windows Installer Supportability

November 15, 2005 Nov 15, 2005 11/15/05
Heath Stewart
Because newer versions of Windows Installer are released with new functionality dependent on operating system features, and older versions of Windows reach the end of their support lifecycle, different versions of Windows Installer are supported on different versions of Windows. Below is the supportability matrix for what versions of Windows ...

Setup Troubleshooting Guide Applicable for Patches, Too

November 15, 2005 Nov 15, 2005 11/15/05
Heath Stewart
Aaron Stebner has posted a compilation of links to many great posts about troubleshooting setup issues regarding, primarily, Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0. It's important to note that much of this is relevant to patch issues, too; though, I suspect you'll see far fewer of these than with previous releases because of the many ...

Save Time when Installing Patches

November 10, 2005 Nov 10, 2005 11/10/05
Heath Stewart
Beginning with Windows Installer 3.0 you can install multiple patches at once, i.e. in a single install transaction. To do this you pass a semicolon-delimited list of fully-qualified paths to patches to the PATCH property. Windows Installer 2.0-style patches are sequenced first in the ordered specified, but then 3.0-style patches are sequenced...