Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

January 2006 - Visual Studio Setup

Developer Division Servicing Site Launched

January 31, 2006 Jan 31, 2006 01/31/06
Heath Stewart
Servicing a large product like Visual Studio or a side-by-side component like the .NET Framework is no small task and is full of challenges. This blog currently describes some of those challenges in hopes of helping others avoid some of the same problems.Today, a site dedicated to servicing Visual Studio and the .NET Framework has launched on ...

Setup.exe Bootstrap Sample and APPVER

January 26, 2006 Jan 26, 2006 01/26/06
Heath Stewart
On an internal alias - which inspires many of my blog entries - someone wasn't able to run the sample bootstrap executable setup.exe, found in the Samples/SysMgmt/Msi/Setup.exe folder in your Platform SDK installation root. The error was "setup.exe is not a valid Win32 application" when run on Windows 2000 but the sample worked fine ...

Why is My Feature Advertised?

January 23, 2006 Jan 23, 2006 01/23/06
Heath Stewart
If you're patching a feature or features of a Windows Installer package and see that a feature you know to be installed locally is now advertised, look for the following in your Windows Installer log:MSI (c) (B8:C0) [12:00:00:000]: SELMGR: ComponentId '{01234567-89AB-CDEF-0123-456789ABCDEF}' is registered to feature 'FeatureA', but is not ...

Suppressing Console Windows for Custom Actions

January 23, 2006 Jan 23, 2006 01/23/06
Heath Stewart
If you have authored a custom action into your installer package and are annoyed by the console window that always pops up when the custom action runs, it's because the custom action executable is running under the console subsystem.When you link your object files with the VC++ linker you can specify the subsystem using the /SUBSYSTEM switch...

Waiting to Install

January 23, 2006 Jan 23, 2006 01/23/06
Heath Stewart
If you've ever tried to install a Windows Installer package and had returned ERROR_INSTALL_ALREADY_RUNNING (1618) it's because the Windows Installer execution server is already processing another install, administrative install, or advertisement action. That is, Windows Installer is processing the InstallExecuteSequence table, the ...

Windows Live Favorites Now More Useful

January 20, 2006 Jan 20, 2006 01/20/06
Heath Stewart
Microsoft announced Windows Live back in November. Since then I've used several of the new services, including my favorite - Windows Live Local (previously MSN Virtual Earth in an earlier incarnation). One service to which I just couldn't see any benefit yet (I know, it's still beta) was Windows Live Favorites.Years ago Netscape 4 had a ...

Error 2262: Not Necessarily a Fatal Error

January 18, 2006 Jan 18, 2006 01/18/06
Heath Stewart
Someone wondered if the following found in a Windows Installer log was indeed an error:MSI (c) (A8:A0) [14:38:51:427]: Transforming table Error.MSI (c) (A8:A0) [14:38:51:427]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038Recall from Diagnosing Installation Errors that field 1 in the second line indicates the Windows Installer error. If you look that ...

Guidelines for COM Interoperability from .NET

January 16, 2006 Jan 16, 2006 01/16/06
Heath Stewart
Below is a running list of posts with guidelines for exposing types from .NET to COM clients. I make occasional updates and will add newer updates to the top of this list. This article serves as an easy reference point with a user-friendly URL to which others or I can refer...

Guidelines for COM Interoperability from .NET (Update 1)

January 16, 2006 Jan 16, 2006 01/16/06
Heath Stewart
Sometime back I posted Guidelines for COM Interoperability from .NET where I enumerated several practices to follow when exposing types from your managed assemblies to COM. This update is to provide some additional information with the release of the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 as well as correct one statement I made with regard to ...

Why is Mscoree.lib So Old?

January 10, 2006 Jan 10, 2006 01/10/06
Heath Stewart
Some people have noticed that mscoree.lib in the Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 2005VCPlatfromSDKLib directory is older than the release date for .NET 2.0. If you run dumpbin.exe on the two libraries you'll see vastly different time stamps:> dumpbin.exe /headers "Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 8VCPlatfromSDKLibmscoree.lib"Dump ...