Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Update for the Palm Treo 700w Available Again

The first update that Palm provided for the Treo 700w wasn't available for long. Soon after I posted about at least one problem with the installation process the update was pulled.I have been informed that the updater is back up and, looking in the downloaded .zip file I see that the ® and ™ symbols have been removed from the file ...

Deleting Bad Feed Items

I'm been using the Windows RSS Platform provided for down-level systems with Internet Explorer 7 for a while, but every so often a few blog posts from our MSDN aggregated feed contain markup or links that cause problems, such as absolute-positioned s and image sources on servers requiring authentication. I can't just unsubscribe to be rid of ...

Update for the Palm Treo 700w Available, with Problems

Palm has released an update to address many of the problems I mentioned previously as well as other issues. While this update is to address problems with the Treo 700w, the update itself had several problems.The first problem I encountered and likely many others will is that when you run setup.exe per instructions you might see a dialog like ...

Calculating Required Space for Installation

Installing a Windows Installer product package requires a certain amount of space on disk, even if all the installation is doing is running a custom action. Besides file costing and other actions typically sandwiched between the CostInitialize and CostFinalize standard actions, Windows Installer will require space under %WINDIR%Installer to ...

Avoid Overwriting Files in Administrative Installations

Last June before the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 shipped, I discussed how during administrative installations some 64-bit files overwrote some 32-bit files and I provided a transform to fix the issue. I filed a bug and the issue was fixed before .NET 2.0 shipped. Later in the release cycle the Office Crash Reporting Tool, otherwise known as ...

Detecting Patches in .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005

Aaron Stebner posted some sample code to detect whether the .NET Framework 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0 were installed and at what service pack level they are. Basically, the .NET Framework installation writes a common, version-specific registry key in the following location along with an SP level registry value. The sample below for an English (United ...

Patch Files Extractor

Previously I discussed conceptually how to extract files from a patch, mentioning that the transforms contained within patches are stored as sub-storages and the cabinets that contain the files are stored as sub-streams. I've had a tool for a while that extracts the transforms and cabinets from a .msp file and wanted to share the slightly ...

New MVP: Javier Lozano

Back in January 2005, a former employee and friend of mine, Nick Parker, was awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for his contributions to the same site where I haunted and got my MVP shortly before I joined Microsoft. He and another former employee and friend helped start and currently serve on the board...

Update #2 on Problems with the Palm Treo 700w

After both Verizon Wireless first and second tier support, and even Palm support told me that the Palm Treo 700w must not support stereo - which, of course, doesn't sound conclusive - I heard from both internal distribution lists and external forums that the Treo does, in fact, support stereo sound and that some headsets - like the one I was ...