Showing archive results for 2006

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, is use...

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 IDE, is...

Visual Studio 2005 works for the most part on Windows Vista, but there are some known issues being addressed beyond SP1. One compatibility issue when running on Vista with UAC enabled may actually occur when installing the recently released SP1 beta on certain editions of Visual Studio 2005. User Account Control, or UAC, basically prevents even use...

As announced on Soma's blog, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta is available today. You can sign up to download the beta and receive more information about what was fixed. Shortly after you complete the survey to sign up you'll receive an email with a link to the download page where more information – including related KB articles –...

As we prepare to ship a large minor upgrade known as Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, I'd like to again remind you that large files – not just Windows Installer packages – that must pass through a SAFER check may fail because enough contiguous memory cannot be allocated on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. I have posted a workaround...

The Microsoft .NET Framework installs assemblies into two different locations, and this practice is recommended to developers wishing to deploy assemblies both for runtime and design-time use. Runtime assemblies are those assemblies needed for an application to execute. It is recommended that you add runtime assemblies to the Global Assembly Cache ...

Lots of people have been asking when Visual Studio 2005 SP1 beta will be released. No dates are released yet, but you can now sign up for the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta to be released on Microsoft Connect.

In response to a previous post about how large patches can cause problems, reader Zodman asks, "Would it be fair to say that SP1 is actually ready, and that the only hold up is problems with the install?"While I can't comment on any dates or availability, I can tell you we are working hard to provide the best possible customer experience to install...

In response to a previous post where I mentioned that work was being done on Visual Studio 2005 SP1, reader ringi commented, "I would match rather has SP1 as a complete 4GB install, including having to uninstall Visual Studio 2005 then have it delayed just to save a little bit of bandwidth."Unfortunately, it's not just a question of bandwidth - eve...

Digitally signing files helps protect against changes to a file (or any data, really) by validating that a hash of the current file matches the hash stored in the digital signature. Digital signatures also help verify that a package came from a particular publisher by encrypting the hash with the publisher's private key. Verifying the signature usi...