Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

2006 - Page 5 of 8 - Visual Studio Setup

Always use Unique Package Codes

June 13, 2006 Jun 13, 2006 06/13/06
Heath Stewart
It's well documented and understood that package codes should be unique for product and patch packages. The package code, also referred to as a patch code for .msp files, is a unique identifier for that package. For patches, the patch code may also be used for obsolescence, where patch codes for patches to be obsolesced are entered into the ...

Run ICE Validation and Fix Errors

June 8, 2006 Jun 8, 2006 06/8/06
Heath Stewart
Windows Installer is a powerful yet complex technology. There are a lot of rules that have to be followed to be able to successfully install, maintain, and uninstall your product and to retain the functionality and tidy clean-up capabilities of Windows Installer. To this end, Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs) exist to aid in validating ...

File Sequencing and How Files are Located

May 19, 2006 May 19, 2006 05/19/06
Heath Stewart
The File table in a Windows Installer package has a Sequence column that begins with 1. Besides determining in what order files are to be installed, this column serves another, relatively more important function: determining where the source files are located.In concert with the Media table, a range of sequence numbers identify in which ...

Posting from Word 2007

May 12, 2006 May 12, 2006 05/12/06
Heath Stewart
I’ve been using primarily Microsoft FrontPage 2003 to author blogs because, like many people, even the reduced HTML output of Word 2003 and older wasn’t clean and tidy and was often difficult to stylize in CSS. This also made it a pain to copy and paste code samples from Visual Studio into Word in order to get HTML to then paste in...

Paint.NET 2 Go

May 11, 2006 May 11, 2006 05/11/06
Heath Stewart
One nice thing about managed applications is the push for touch-free application deployment. Paint.NET is a perfect example of a relatively powerful application that can simply be copied to any machine with the required .NET Framework version installed and then executed. With the recent release of Paint.NET v2.62 I wanted to take advantage of ...

Update for the Palm Treo 700w Available Again

April 28, 2006 Apr 28, 2006 04/28/06
Heath Stewart
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

April 25, 2006 Apr 25, 2006 04/25/06
Heath Stewart
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

April 22, 2006 Apr 22, 2006 04/22/06
Heath Stewart
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

April 20, 2006 Apr 20, 2006 04/20/06
Heath Stewart
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

April 14, 2006 Apr 14, 2006 04/14/06
Heath Stewart
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 ...