Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

2010 - Visual Studio Setup

Providing feedback on Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta installation

December 8, 2010 Dec 8, 2010 12/8/10
Heath Stewart
By installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta now (or tomorrow for general availability), you have a great opportunity to provide early feedback before we ship VS2010 SP1 RTM. Not only do we welcome feedback on the updates to the product such as the new Help Viewer, performance regressions, and more; but we also want to hear your feedback on the ...

Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta

December 7, 2010 Dec 7, 2010 12/7/10
Heath Stewart
If you haven’t seen from Soma’s or Jason’s blog, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta is available today for MSDN Subscribers and will be available on Thursday for the general public. This service pack contains a lot of performance improvements and a new Help Viewer based on strong customer feedback. You can find out about more ...

Delete shadow copies to compact VHDs and AVHDs

December 7, 2010 Dec 7, 2010 12/7/10
Heath Stewart
For a few years my primary development machine has actually been a VM with source located on a physical hard drive attached to the VM. This helps reduce latency compared to a differencing disk (AVHD) which may need to expand to accommodate additional data (common when building). It’s also easier to maintain than multiple boot entries ...

Restart Manager functionality in WiX 3.5

September 16, 2010 Sep 16, 2010 09/16/10
Heath Stewart
WiX 3.5 provides features to integrate with Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010. But like many add-ins, since new files are being added they certainly can’t be in use by devenv.exe. So when we call devenv.exe /setup as part of our install, the changes may not show up in running instances of Visual Studio. To provide a better experience – ...

Downgrading Shared Components

September 8, 2010 Sep 8, 2010 09/8/10
Heath Stewart
Shared components define shared resources. It might seem obvious, but it’s important to understand that whatever you do to a shared resource during the installation of one product affects those same resources for any other product. For example, when upgrading one product to update files shared with another product, that other product ...

Comparison of PatchWiz and WiX v3 Patch Build

August 24, 2010 Aug 24, 2010 08/24/10
Heath Stewart
The Windows Installer SDK ships a library named patchwiz.dll. This contains the logic to build a patch from pairs of database packages (.msi files, or simply MSIs) along with other configuration properties. Another tool that the SDK ships is msimsp.exe which uses patchwiz.dll and parses command line options. These tools consume an input file ...

Visual Studio 2010 Uninstall Utility

August 23, 2010 Aug 23, 2010 08/23/10
Heath Stewart
While we hope you’ll love Visual Studio 2010 for all the application development it enables with powerful features and a robust extension model that enables great extensions like the Productivity Power Tools, if you ever need to uninstall Visual Studio it can be difficult. If you’ve ever tried to remove Visual Studio you already ...

Customizing Shortcuts for Visual Studio

August 21, 2010 Aug 21, 2010 08/21/10
Heath Stewart
After installing the last several releases of Visual Studio, you’ll find shortcuts to command prompts that automatically set up the PATH, INCLUDE, LIB, and other environment variables. At least with Visual Studio 2010 these command prompts have larger buffers and enable quick edit mode, but some people like to customize these shortcuts ...

Major Upgrades with Shared Components

April 9, 2010 Apr 9, 2010 04/9/10
Heath Stewart
Major upgrades are Windows Installer products that can be installed like any other product with the added benefit of removing one ore more related products. For example, version 2 of a product can be installed on a clean machine, or on a machine with version 1 already installed and will remove version 1.When another version of a product is ...