Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

December 2006 - Visual Studio Setup

The Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Installation Experience

December 29, 2006 Dec 29, 2006 12/29/06
Heath Stewart
Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 can take a long time to install and may apply to multiple products on your machine, appearing to install multiple times. This is a large service pack and installs a lot of files, fixing many issues and adding several new features to over 200 Visual Studio 2005 editions. What follows is a detailed description ...

Installation Guidelines for User-editable Configuration

December 21, 2006 Dec 21, 2006 12/21/06
Heath Stewart
A common problem with installations is user-editable files and registry keys. Configuration of this nature is a problem for every installer technology, but here are some guidelines to help developers overcome problems like users' preferences being reset during repair. Windows Installer is a data-driven installation technology. Installing a ...

Uninstall Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta before Installing the Release

December 18, 2006 Dec 18, 2006 12/18/06
Heath Stewart
Before installing the release of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, you must uninstall the Service Pack 1 Beta. If you do not uninstall the beta first, you will receive the following message localized appropriately for Windows, "The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service because the program to be upgraded may be ...

Detecting Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

December 17, 2006 Dec 17, 2006 12/17/06
Heath Stewart
Now that Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is released, it can be detected programmatically in various ways. Registry detection is recommended for ease and is less impacted by future changes to the product installation. Because there are many different Visual Studio 2005 editions and service pack 1 patch packages, you may need to perform ...

Slipstreaming Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

December 16, 2006 Dec 16, 2006 12/16/06
Heath Stewart
Now that Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is released, some are wondering how to slipstream the patch so they can install Visual Studio 2005 with SP1 already applied. Much of this process is standard practice for Windows Installer packages. Please note this will require a lot of disk space, as you’re unpacking around 3 GB – and ...

Source Resolution during Patch Uninstall

December 9, 2006 Dec 9, 2006 12/9/06
Heath Stewart
There are a number of guidelines to prevent requiring source media for patch installation. These guidelines can also help prevent requiring source media during patch uninstall, but there are a number of caveats. Recall from Rebuilding the Installer Cache that the baseline cache contains files that were replaced. But files that get replaced don...

The Windows Installer Service

December 8, 2006 Dec 8, 2006 12/8/06
Heath Stewart
Some have noticed that the msiexec.exe process seems to run for quite some time after a known installation completing, or that the Windows Installer service starts and stops even though it is set to manual startup mode. These are often the same process, and when you see msiexec.exe running as SYSTEM that is the Windows Installer service ...