Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Small Updates Should Usually Target a Single Baseline

Generally, small updates target a specific ProductVersion, and with Windows Installer 3.0 and newer minor upgrades should target the RTM ProductVersion using MinorUpdateTargetRTM in the MsiPatchMetadata table to support cumulative minor upgrades, which is a win for customers. What happens when a small update doesn't target a single ...

VS 2005 SP1 Update for Vista Requires VS 2005 SP1

If you're attempting to install the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista without having installed Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 first on all applicable products, you will receive Windows error 1642, which reads, The installer cannot install the upgrade patch because the program being upgraded may be missing or the ...

Introducing Windows Installer PowerShell Extensions

Some time back I mentioned in a comment I was working on some PowerShell extensions for Windows Installer. Actually, it was a long time ago and I've spent more time learning the "ins" and "outs" of PowerShell (mostly the "ins" using .NET Reflector because the documentation needs work) than actually writing anything. Then, of course, there was ...

Better Searching with Live Search and OpenSearch Discovery

Sometime back I updated my blog to take advantage of Internet Explorer 7 by providing an OpenSearch discovery document for my blog. Since then I've made some changes, such as moving the OpenSearch discovery document to be hosted on this site to accommodate for differences in downtime with its previous host, and corrected my text for the ...

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Available

As Aaron notes, the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista is available on the download center. This patch is available for all supported languages of Visual Studio 2005, unlike the beta which was available in English and Japanese. You should first uninstall the beta update for Vista. Note that you do not have to right-...

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is Hot – Maybe too Hot

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is a big release with many fixes and lots of new features. But with several known issues related to its size, SP1 is a hot issue - maybe a little too hot. A couple of customers were encountering a problem while when installing VS 2005 SP1 their laptops would reset - not reboot. After generating verbose logs ...