Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

October 2006 - Visual Studio Setup

How Windows Installer uses Languages

October 25, 2006 Oct 25, 2006 10/25/06
Heath Stewart
Language support in Windows Installer can be confusing until you understand how Windows Installer queries for and uses languages. Some wonder why Windows Installer packages have two different places to set the language. Some wonder why, for example, localized packages install using a different language than the user's default UI language. Some...

Mitigating Custom Action Problems for Patches on Vista

October 25, 2006 Oct 25, 2006 10/25/06
Heath Stewart
Because some of the custom actions in Visual Studio 2005 are authored to impersonate the non-privileged token of the invoking user on Vista, a mitigation has been checked in for the patch wrapper that is used to add additional compression for the patch and to patch multiple products, if present, without rebooting in between. The native wrapper...

Impersonating the Right Token in Vista

October 20, 2006 Oct 20, 2006 10/20/06
Heath Stewart
In The NoImpersonate Bit Mistake, Robert Flaming of the Windows Installer team discusses how some custom actions may fail because they impersonate the non-privileged client token and won't be able to perform some actions. Such a scenario is described in Custom Actions under UAC on Vista. For administrative users on Vista, a client token would ...

Comment Policy Change

October 19, 2006 Oct 19, 2006 10/19/06
Heath Stewart
Effective immediately, I am changing comment options on this blog to only allow comments for posts made within the last 60 days. Like Sara and most – if not all – other bloggers on this site, I get a lot of comment spam and it takes too much time to wade through, and in the past I've accidentally deleted a couple of comments or ...

VS 2005 SP1 Tries to Install Multiple Times

October 6, 2006 Oct 6, 2006 10/6/06
Heath Stewart
Some customers are reporting that Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta tries to install multiple times. There are a couple of actions that can reproduce this issue. First, because the SP1 patch is so large, it takes a while for wrapper to extract it. You can verify this by watching the working memory set increase in the task manager. Without...

VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

October 6, 2006 Oct 6, 2006 10/6/06
Heath Stewart
Quite a few beta customers have reported that the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta install requires a lot of space. This is by design a feature of Windows Installer. The amount of space required to install the patch can be reduced but a lot of space is still consumed after the patch is installed. Patches are cached in whole because when ...

VS 2005 SP1 Takes a While to Install

October 6, 2006 Oct 6, 2006 10/6/06
Heath Stewart
One of the most-reported feedback issues with Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta is about how long it takes to install. There are, unfortunately, a couple things that account for this and currently nothing we can do to prevent them. We have been considering options to at least inform the users what to expect when installing VS 2005 SP1, ...

Introducing the Patch Applicability Browser

October 4, 2006 Oct 4, 2006 10/4/06
Heath Stewart
Today I'm pleased to announce that Sara has helped me post a useful tool I wrote to help eliminate confusion to which products a patch applies and which of those products are installed on your system. There has been quite a bit of confusion because there are a lot of Visual Studio editions, and the Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, ...

Patch Applicability Browser

October 3, 2006 Oct 3, 2006 10/3/06
Heath Stewart
Windows Installer patches can target multiple products, and Developer Division makes a practice of shipping patches that take advantage of this capability. This typically helps avoid confusion among users about which patch to download. However, because Visual Studio ships as many editions and even the Integrated Development Environment, or ...